Workflow for XLSForms?

[chlarsen]

Dear Andrew,
As the hall of fame of applications is getting old (all of them over 2 years, it seems), and xlsform-converter fills a HUGE gap for easy questionnaire drafting and handling, I think it is high time to establish a clear work flow on how to handle XLSForm imports. Your installation instructions do include data model creation via XLSForms, but there is no information on repeated updates, repeated migrations, etc. I have the impression that I find a lot of unnecessary leftovers in the database after a few XLSForm installation attempts, so am deleting the entire database every time. Not very elegant, indeed!
What is more, and while the system does not throw any error whatsoever, and check runs fine, even with the simplest of forms, there is no synchronisation, nor any tables with actual content seen in the database. Locally, I do get incremental record numbers.
Most of all this are probably documentation issues, but the sheer lack of a whole work-up makes it really, really hard to get this system running.... even though it is the only one I know that has the potential to offer a solid escape from the ODK biotope!
Any help, thoughts would be hugely appreciated. I have by the way, protocolled as much as possible the set up and configuration process (for FreeBSD and jail), but got, again, stuck here, fighting essentially against looming (humanitarian) deadlines.
Thank you so much,
Chris