Ah... the problem is that the client classes we can currently deal with don't include some classes that I want to deal with. And we haven't yet come up with a 'hook API' to allow more complicated classes to be persisted, so we can't stop yet.

As for the distinction between development tools and 'everything else', well, in a very meaningful sense Pixie is a development tool in that it will allow the average developer to make her objects persistent with almost no work. If that's not development support I don't know what it is. And check out the implementation of tools like SmartRefStream in your local Smalltalk image; there's an object persistence system that indulges in some serious voodoo.