I forgot to post a status report since last Friday was pretty hectic.
In short form, last week I:
-Finished the logging mechanisms so that the logs will track things
besides just command execution.
-Wrote a command-line wrapper in C to an ISO manipulation library to
make things far more efficient and avoid any number of difficulties
with generating bootable ISOs from the Gentoo autobuilds
-Stopped generating the base system with emerge system (which was very
slow and not really complete) and moved to using stage3 tarballs
instead
-Cache a list of packages and init scripts present in the stage3s in
the database
-Quite a bit of clean-up of the backend to make the logs less messy
and the automatic notification emails actually usable
In the last two days, I:
-Cleaned up some pointless links in the frontend
-Rehashed the configuration wizard so I can reuse the HTML form
classes in other contexts
-Tweaked the package selection mechanism for efficiency
-Added the option to remove init scripts enabled by default and
packages present in the stage3

Ideally I'd like to make the system available for testing ASAP, but
since the system needs root access to run, getting a server to run it
on is a little tricky.

I'd like to ask for some input here.  I intend to make an option
available whereby instead of using an entire stage3 system, the user
can choose to have all packages not absolutely necessary for a working
system uninstalled.  Please respond off-list with the following: the
make.profile you use (or arch) and a list of packages absolutely
necessary for the base system.