I had two monstrous pieces of code I was grappling with: html.directory.viewDirectory and mainResponder.respond. It was so onerous I even wrote it up in a Scripting News blog post. It has to be a huge weight to get that kind of treatment.
I've completed the first grapple, now it's time to do the second. But I'm going to approach it in a different manner.
I'm not going to gut my adversary, instead I'm going to create a minimal responder. Instead of the kitchen sink approach, which is what MRR is, I'm going to create a bare bones responder just for worldOutline.root. Because it's singularly not in need of the machinery of MRR, what it needs is so simple, that I think I can write it in a couple of days. So I'm willing to risk the couple of days, and see if it's right. If it works out, it could change the course of development at this level in Frontier. If not, I've lost a couple of days. But probably will learn a bunch and be ready to do some work on MRR. Let's see what happens.
BTW, in 1998, the kitchen sink approach was the correct one. We needed a package that moved all that stuff out of the way, behind an interface -- so we could build the next layer up, which was Manila. But by the time we got to Radio, just a couple of years later, we were already writing a new responder.
Update: It worked. I cut out not only mainResponder.respond, but also html.buildObject. Neither of them were doing anything for me, since the directory structure already mimics the "walk" that MRR does. And I wasn't using the website framework at all, having completely converted to string.multipleReplaceAll. We get a fresh start! Ha!