preliminary observe support, and some other fixes and improvements

[dgv]

[dustin]

This is pretty large for a single commit. Can you split it up into a few more functional parts? This is most useful when trying to track down issues and wanting to understand the nature of changes, minimize rollbacks, etc...

e.g. I usually find that if I'm writing "and" in a commit summary, I've done too much in a single commit.

[dgv]

Hi @dustin, sorry, sure! I will split and resubmit later...thank you