support for hierarchical module naming schemes

@geimer: this should fix the problem that's blocking you right now

I might need to figure out one more thing w.r.t. the devel module name before this really works for you, I'm looking into that...
what's the alternative to a decorator here? I don't want to copy-paste the code that now lives in the decorator for each of the `det_*_mns` functions...

Isn't the purpose of a decorator to wrap common funcitonality around another function (i.e. exactly what it's doing here)? Just by reading the docstring of the decorator and interpreting its name, it should be clear what's going on?