Might as well give this a try.
Caught the illustrious graydon on IRC, had a nice chat about CORBA. I probably should have looked into it more before implementing MOS (Meta Object System, see Amherst Distributed Reality for the specifics.) Not that I think CORBA would have been a perfect fit for our application, since it has some specific feature requirements, but because it's good to have another point of view, especially when the two systems are conceptually similar.
Finally rounding out the lifecycle of objects though. It was sort of bad that you could aquire and manipulate objects, but not get rid of them :) But things ought to get GC'd now... I hope.
Arrrrg! I wish Java3D 1.2 for linux would come out. The interesting parts of our project (working virtual reality) are at a complete standstill. It's very frustrating.
I'll keep y'all posted, 'cause when this finally comes together its gonna be mad cool :)