Ok, in trying to debug the sandcastle stuff that I ran into, I removed this to test things out and it didn't change behavior at all.  I think the key is that stream piping gets set up on the same tick of the node process, which is currently happening and thus this shouldn't be a problem.  It is definitely brittle code, though, but the logging is important and I didn't want to have to buffer the whole thing in memory if we didn't have to.