I knew I could count on you Capt.
Meanwhile, in the last 20 minutes I had an epiphany that should allow me to get an honest-to-goodness functional test script up and running in about 10 minutes tomorrow morning with no further structural changes to the underlying platform necessary. A multithreaded test script no less! It might necessitate some tweaks in the future if I alter said platform, but it should be mostly cosmetic, and localized to meta-data type stuff, the meat of the coding should remain fairly agnostic to the structure around it.
And now that I think about it, that kinda helps solidify where I want to go and what I was pondering when I formulated this thread. I think it will help me a lot to separate the development process into 2 different "threads". Creating the test harness that the scripts plug into vs. designing the heart of the scripts. The latter can remain quick-and-dirty, whatever it takes to flesh out the logical flow of the scripts. Then, if I do my job right on the former, it's just a matter of porting the quick-and-dirty version to follow the template.
I think that's where my hesitance to "build the foundation" was coming form. If I'm thinking too much about error handling and portability and readability and whatever while trying to just figure out the best way to run a test and analyze the results, I get bogged down and never finish. I think centralizing all that will save me a lot of mental bandwidth.