I too was a 6700'er who kitchen'ed regularly, that was why I jumped right in. After getting my hand slapped/burned/etc, I got very nervous about it too. I was freaking out that day. I got stuck in bootloader for about an hour then I had a phone that was going nuts and forum responses were too slow and I had no one to turn to. I think there is enough information now (and new releases of stuff) that it is significantly safer. I even soft reset my phone today to make sure I could and it worked great.
multi-threaded SMS, yes I got it, didn't know I was getting it, it's kind'a cool. I didn't think about it until you mentioned it. My daughter text messaged me a bunch of times yesterday and I noticed it was different, I figured dcd swapped it out. Seems fine to me.
As for stuck in boot loader, I think my getting stuck the first time on the previous phone was a combination of problems.
1) There is mention that some people need to reboot their computer in between 2 specific steps if you get stuck.
2) There apparently is a thing you can run to un-stick you.
I did not run into that this time... thank goodness
