yeah, I don't think it makes sense for it to be there personally but it turned out there were more issues than that and I was never actually able to administer the site.  Have you ever tried to pull this project from scratch and set it up?  I hacked around a few errors but still couldn't get in to the admin backend and after an hour or two I had to give up and just configured and deployed spree instead.  If I remember correctly it had to do with the .admin? method (and consequently the is_admin filter etc.) returning false for my superuser...