Yeah, it's the six-button limitation that simply isn't going to work for me. My goal was to get something that gave me many more buttons without buying another piece of hardware. It even looks like someone wrote the glue to make the Squeezebox forward commands for me, so this will probably entail little if any hacking.

Apple's decision to put an IR receiver on but cripple it is puzzling -- it had to be harder to write custom firmware to only handle six buttons than it would have been to slap a general IR receiver on there and decode it in the driver. But I guess it does create some business opportunities for enterprising developers.