I'm sorry to say I am *way* behind on my patch reading (and moving into my new place this weekend where i have no net access isn't going to help) so i can't comment on the technique (or even style) of this patch ... but if you could do peopel a favor and open a Jira issue and post it there for people to review i would be very much appreciated...
http://wiki.apache.org/solr/HowToContribute http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR ...one quick comment based on something that jumped out at me from your mail, removing public static methods will make it really hard to apply this patch in a backwards compatible way (since many people may have custom request handlers that rely on those methods) ... but if you're using a "null" key in maps to refer to the default Core/Config you should be able to keep the existing methods arround (deprecated) as wrappers for your new methods right? -Hoss
