4) Is the only problem that I think is hard, and I believe that by
    having an explicit dependency list in each script file, we can
    probably have some code produce an ordering based on dependencies
    rather than trying to do this by kludges like putting numbers in front
    of the scripts.

There already are programs in NetBSD which "solve" problems like this,
including tsort and make.

I'm sure one or more of them could be abused to solve this problem.. :-)

					- Bill