Well, not exactly alive, but it's working. It's freaking working! I can now insert new records (creating new xml documents) and save them, run queries, edit records, and save those changes. Whew.
There is some final cleanup I want to do (finish migrating from DOM4J to JDOM, clean out all of the debugging spaghetti outputs, and comment the heck out of it), then I'll package it up and drop it on Sourceforge.
This has been one of the most frustrating projects I've ever done (and I've been involved with some doozies). It was frustrating simply because I wasn't able to grok some of the finer points of EOF's behind-the-scenes magic. Thanks to King for providing insight (it wouldn't have ever worked without his guidance!)
I'm completely sure there is some stuff I'll need to modify, and it's entirely possible I'm doing stuff the Wrong Way, but it's working well enough to be used, and that's what counts...
UPDATE: Just updated the adaptor to use an EO_PK root of the current database, which will increment primary keys in a predictable way. Very cool. Works quite nicely. Now to generate some metrics on the whole operation. Tomorrow...