Hi Guys,
I'm new to Arduino but not new to AVRs and AVR-GCC etc.
By way of introduction, I have worked on several Open Source AVR Model Railroad Digital Control projects (http://embeddedloconet.sourceforge.net & http://opendcc.sourceforge.net) and have an AVRISP, AVRISP mkII, AVR Dragon, AVR JTAG-II and STK500 to assist development.
I've use AVRDUDE for a long time and also done a few little bug fixes in AVRDUDE a while back to improve the timing of parallel port bit-bashed programmers work in Windows and so I have a reasonable handle on this... 
My interest in Arduino is fueled by the possibility of using it to reduce the entry barrier new DIYers face getting into embedded C coding etc and this platform looks to do quite a bit to hide a lot of complexity and make it a lot easier to get started, WITHOUT really closing any doors to experienced C/C++ developers who know what is really going on here and how they can do normal C/C++ stuff anyway.
Looking over the Arduino IDE and reading the docs I can see that having a bootloader is real good to make it easy to work with the Arduino boards and I have used them before, but if you want to just work directly with one of the usual ICSP programmers then things look to get real hard quickly.
I note some comments about this being fixed in the 0011 release but wonder what is being planned? Are these changes in the SVN codebase already?
Without knowing the v 0011 solution, I wonder if you would consider adding an option to the IDE to NOT specify any ports, baud or programmer and just let AVRDUDE use its own defaults or the user defined programmer and ports etc in the avrdude.rc file - if it exists?
This would allow advanced users to define their own programmer and just leave the Arduino IDE to call AVRDUDE specifying the files and fuses etc but leave off the programmer specific options.
I've downloaded all the development source code and Cygwin and the build seems to work so I might hack the existing code to leave off the programmer stuff to get me going as I really want to play without having to toggle windows all the time... 
Comments?
Cheers
Alex Shepherd