Just wanted to drop in a note to thank for this extensive, almost hidden, comment. I just commented on the previous article you wrote but I see you already answered some of my concerns here.

I'm googling for PyMeld right now to see what that is about. I'm also curious the way you work with Samba mounts -- I presume you have customers mount a checkout remotely and edit through the filesystem? If this works for you, perhaps we can document this pattern somewhere as it may mitigate some of the issues.

Agreed by the way that TTW is not the focus of this issue -- the issue is customization, easy and remote customization, not the particular way this is done, such as TTW. The one benefit TTW editing has is that it's very easy to deploy and start using, but perhaps your Samba approach offers an alternative model with similar benefits.