My own thoughts, for what they're worth...
A "complete working examples" section would be invaluable. The most useful part of the man pages for the command line & admin tools was the example section... it ties everything together. Same for the examples in the admin guide... a complete example to compliment the conceptual words is priceless. Funny you mention it, but i was also disappointed in the N-Way configuration example (17.4.3)... but because it was in the "new" config file format, which i wasn't using.
Anyway, I understand you want readers to read thoroughly and try creating their own configuration from scratch... but i've found it's rare that a user will spend the time to "properly" understand something before they actually try making it work. Rather, they try something, research/fix the error, try again, research/fix, etc... whatever it takes to get it working as quick as possible. In my experience, syntax diagrams and working examples are the most important, time-saving (and sanity-saving) pieces of documentation. Having working example configurations that are commented thoroughly ("see section ____ for more info on configuration specifics for this", "modify the following statements with your own specific values", etc.) might be the best solution.
Thanks again for all your help
openldap-technical@openldap.org