Yes! At least I am having fun 
, better yet I'm both learning and making progress. I think I can set default units in Inkscape in the preferences.xml file (or via edit->preferences) although some things remain in px. The good news is that I kept a copy of the broken voltmeter part (or more correctly an unbroken voltmeter part that I know how to break!) and have reproduced the change to style that breaks bendable leads. I also can manually edit the file to return the style statement to plain xml and have the modified svg work again in Frtizing and thus can get perl to do the same thing when post processing the Inkscape svgs saved as plain svg. That seems at the moment the easier of the two possible changes (this one or using optimised svg and trying to reinstate the optimized out data back in to the pins). We will see if that remains the case! Assuming I can get this working then there will need to be major changes to the create howto document in the never ending stream of work, but parts creation will get a little easier and more documented ...
Peter Van Epp