1. It was the ephemeral "I don't wanna" combined with a dose of "Gee it sure would be clever if I could do this".
2. See my answer to Abigail. I may have--ahem--overstated the difficulty of maintenance somewhat.
4. I would do that, except the environment isn't running Apache, I'm leaving my current assignment in three weeks, and I'm way too dumb to install Apache and learn CGI in that amount of time. :)