Yep., learning the kitchen and rolling your own is the very best way to go, if you can get your head around it - it's not that bad, and there is a nice library of prefab "OEM" packages of shareware already on the FTP site. It's actually not hard at all to rip apart a cab file and make your own rom-able apps.
Bonuses -
1) stuff that you *had* to install on internal storage now goes in rom
2) more free internal storage
3) apps load (ever so slightly) faster from rom
and as you note
4) after a hard reset, it's ready to go
No reinstalls!
Mine comes up exactly the same after a hard reset as it was before, less the pim data (which is backed up on the card - backing up/restoring the pim.vol file works fine if it's the same rom rev) and the email settings, which I also have backed up in some other utility (I think I posted that info, maybe its in the rom kitchen team section) and of course BT device parings.
I can go from hard reset to fully restored in about 3 minutes now
and I use many many freeware apps, all in rom.
Sweeetness.