Hi Mike,
I am running aolserver 3.3+ad13 + RH 9 + PG 7.3.x. RH9 comes with PG 7.3.x, although I think Lamar has made a rpm packages for RH9 7.2.4. So far it runs, but maybe if you are more conservative you should go with RH 8 or RH 7.3. I have to change some stuff to make my Java stuff run, I am not sure how affected is aolserver with the new threading stuff. So far aolserver seems to run fine. I did however did not try to run daemontools anymore since, I was to lazy to recompile it.
Your decision to migrate the setup is more work and I agree with your decision that it is better in the long run. I have taken this route a couple of times too. Wherein you inherit a mess, get the needed stuff then migrate to known clean setup.
Also those with root privs has to be few. Like you said too many cooks. Andrew did point out that some or most of those don't document things, etc. But I think if you know the cook is good then stick with only 1 and 2 backup cooks. Putting more cooks only makes things worse even good cooks, more poor cooks even makes it worse. Also I was able to setup things wherein developers have no root access and still be able to do what ever they want with their OpenACS sites. Something similar can be done in the openacs.org site. Each site has their own user, where the only the needed developers can access that user.
Atleast you got control of your own box, in my current situation I have no control of the box. The client box is a mess, although I would like clean it but I don't have time to go back to sys admin stuff.
I also think that once openacs.org is migrated to a good setup people will not care much of it. The real hardwork of sys admin stuff is in the start, if the sys admin is still doing work after setup then he/she did a poor job on the start.
