Ohh... um... Not sure what the concern is... The first step I see is allowing startup behaviors to be defined in config.ini, which doesn't involve changing any of the shutdown/power fail stuff, as far as I can tell. Even with the play/pause behavior described above, it seems all that's needed is to see if we're in AC or DC mode (already available to the kernel) and change the way we save the state accordingly, possibly saving one bit in a different location than is currently done. State isn't just written at power fail time, it's also written once per second, so I don't see how shutdowns would hurt us.

I guess you're privy to more of the details and troubles the Empeg team went through, so any specific guidance you could give would be helpful.