Ok, it's been almost a month since my initial email here.
If there's no objections, I'll upload the new busybox release tomorrow (from the "mjt" branch). It's enough waiting :) I want to enable awk applet for d-i (udeb) config before the upload, for some things it is much easier to use than e.g. sed. I do have some more thoughts, including some doubts about the way I changed the build procedure (it looks like there's a simpler way), but that's for the future. Thanks, /mjt