@inthehands Appreciate the vote of confidence. Too busy a set of choices out there, but I have a couple of communities to bounce things off of which I should call on a little more often.
Really, a Node server looked like a good choice at the start, and I suppose I am getting portable knowledge, but mostly it's been a direct lesson in complex messy dependencies. When I'm tempted to write my own binary image compositor, I figure a wrong turn was taken somewhere.