Re: using a proxy/rewrite to obviate the need for a legacy suffix?

Can anyone provide any hints, suggestions, or moral support on whether we're heading in the recommended direction, or whether there's a better way to obviate the need for our legacy suffix entry using some other kind of rewriting?

Database relay is designed precisely for this purpose, and I'd be confident to recommend it to you. There's no way it's going away anytime soon (if ever; for now, let's just state that it's in 2.3 and 2.4 both), and "experimental" is likely more documentation issue than reality at this point. As always, keep up to patch for best results (ITS#4958), but if you've already migrated to 2.3 it sounds like the heavy lifting is done.