Hi Keith,
Nice to see you around here again... (Keith is my work supervisor at USU 😊)
Did you mean to say that your experience has taught to keep the number of objects down (instead of not to keep it down)?
I know several things were fixed in 4.5 with respect to the permissions system (although I can't remember exactly what), and more things were improved in 4.6 (see http://www.brasileiro.net/roberto/artigos/new-changelog.html specially the acs-kernel and acs-tcl sections).
-Roberto
