Snarky replies? Feels like home. 
On that note, my apologies if my previous reply had some snark to it.
I was thinking about my reply. Some time ago I took the liberty of making the wiki page about "My camera isn't ported." a little more friendly. But its still a bit dismissive.
Good to hear the port work isn't too bad. I work in the hardware verification field, while hardware designs are still in the code phase, so I can do coding. I also spent some time in web dev doing object-oriented PHP and MySQL. The trick is doing software development. I'm not used to SVN, development environments, and the like. I do VIM on a Unix command line and that's about it. So we'll see how long it takes me to ramp up.
If you can handle VIM, you are probably already in the elite of of CHDK developers. But seriously, a little knowledge of C and assembler (preferrable ARM) makes a huge difference. There have been a couple of ports recently by people who claimed to have no software experience but it was not pretty.
Frankly, I either learn or take a loss on purchasing a Canon camera that doesn't quite do what I want it to. There's a fair bit of chromatic aberration on contrasting spots in the shot, but that's acceptable for a point-and-shoot, and shooting in RAW would let me clean a lot of that up if I care about the shot. So... the video length limit is the only real holdout.
Well, depending on your hourly rate expectations, you can probably buy a couple of top of the line P&S cameras or a great DSLR for what this project will cost you in time. Unless you are like the other crazy people around here who actually enjoy this stuff.
Also, the video time limit solutions so far are not great. Mostly you use a script to restart the video just before it has times out. You end up with multiple files with a brief gap between them.
RAW is another subject of hot debate. The RAW images are not like those you get from a good DSLR. They are messy and need a lot of cleanup - which is what the P&S camera does before saving the image as a JPG. There was a challenge posted recently on the forum for a RAW image that looked better than the associated full resolution JPG after post-processing. Not sure anyone was able to show that.
