BC,
At the risk of being perceived to be a member of the male genitalia I'd like to offer my protest to your thoughts of leaving the swamp.
IMO:
The swamp is the best place on the net for AutoCAD programming. You're a fool to not utilize it.
You need to forget your ego. I've read several times about how you're learning and you're new, but frankly I don't care. I get the impression that you're used to knowing what you're doing and this step into unknown muddy waters is a little scary (especially with the potential ogres [yes at the swamp I like to think of them as ogres rather than trolls {hope that's ok with you kerry}]) but it's wasting everybody's time reiterating that you're learning. Instead of telling me what you don't know, I'd like to see you tell me what you're doing, what you know (or think you know) , and what you need to know.
These guys do want to help you, they've gone as far as telling you what they want from you to minimize the time they have to spend looking through your code (they are doing it for free...) to understand what you're trying to do, considering you don't provide any explanation or comments.
That said, I suggest you suck it up and stick it out. I don't want to see you quit, this is a very powerful application and you've made the right choice in stepping beyond lisp. Stop complaining about what is being provided for free help, these guys know everything, you want them to be able to read your code.
If it's helpful, I spent a lot of my very early time on through the interface. It took about a year of working on cad customizations before I came across anything really unique that I couldn't find in another post somewhere, so I didn't have any need to post any questions or comments until recently. I was disappointed to get very little criticism, so it really irritates me to see you getting good critical input and not appreciating it.
Cheers