Drupal 7 introduces a number of new apis and with those comes new jargon. Untangling that could be daunting. I'll try to briefly sketch what is what and relate it to terminology outside of the Drupal world.
During the drupal plugin/update manager discussions I had an aha moment. One of those weird and wonderful ideas came back to me. What if most of the code lived in the db?
Lately I was looking into how to reduce the spam traffic to this website. Not just comment spam, but various harvesters and other nasties. They steal too much http bandwidth.