[Motorola Droid 4] Septfox:
I'll look at it later on today, since I too value this function.

Amen to that.

Default /system/ size is what, 700mb? That fits the ROM+Gapps package no problem, if I recall right. So yea, over-provisioning by a good 300mb probably wouldn't do anything. 700/3000/1000 is a good starting point, but you might want to bump the Data partition to 4000 instead if you plan on installing a ton of apps. ART takes up a lot of room.

S'what I'm trying to say; everything was working fine last night (well, night before last now), then everything went to hell, at least on my end. It's like the bugs saw you coming and came crawling out of the woodwork :v

Define "hung". Did it make it to the boot animation and seem to sit there endlessly, or is it sitting at the post-buzz black screen?

The former might just be it taking its sweet time, the first boot with an empty cache can take forever.

My phone is defective, in various ways. So yes, at least some of it is probably unique to my hardware. Yay. I've never had any serious problems before with SS itself, though.

I did reinstall it, actually. Didn't think to Restore Defaults, though, because it's never saved settings anyway that I can tell.

The "No OS Installed" thing seems to happen when Safestrap fails to remount the /system image/partition properly. If you switch slots, switch back, then check your active slot info, you can see it in action. I've gotten used to its shenanigans and just completely ignore it now, which doubtlessly leaves it feeling unloved.

Yea, it should be fine. There's actually a comparison in the PAGapps post showing what it gives you. The most significant things missing compared to Micro (at least, significant to me) are Gmail and Face Unlock, the latter of which hasn't been fixed in CM12 yet anyway.

The separate Gapps packages actually exist because the CM team (or probably any ROM dev) isn't supposed to include them for legal reasons; there's Google proprietary stuff in there. If you boot the ROM Gappsless, it'll work, but you'll find that it has pretty much no inbuilt Google functionality.

So, no, you don't change or overwrite anything by installing Gapps, it's a pure bolt-on functionality upgrade.

On one hand, I can see what you mean and even mostly agree with it.

On the other hand...that interoperability does add quite a bit of convenience. And Play Services specifically lets Google add functionality and certain new APIs to all devices, instead of suggesting changes to each vendor and watching them take their sweet time implementing them, only to end up with only flagship devices getting functionality upgrades.

So again, while I agree to a point, they're tying it all together as "right" as they can. And really, it should all be tied together tightly; Android is a Google product. Even up until as late as KitKat, the Services Framework and Play Services felt halfassedly glued on, draining ridiculous amounts of standby power unless manually neutered, which in turn kind of defeated a lot of the purpose of installing Gapps to begin with. With the better integration in LP, and the new APIs that come with Project Volta, installing Gapps is no longer a choice between increased functionality and going for more than a few hours without charging back up: you get both, no fuss, no muss.

Whew. I started sounding a bit spokespersonish there for a second.

Keep in mind that they're compressed, part of the flashing routine is decompressing them to where they need to go. But you're right, it's nowhere near enough to fill a nearly 1gb system partition. Available space definitely isn't the problem.