By all means do not be discouraged. Inline has allowed me to generate almost 2000 lines of interface code to a complex set of api's in less than two weeks - they are now in daily production, working like a charm. We are now extending the api interface to handle real time interfaces and spoolers. All of this with no XS experience, though I have read the perlguts and api docs more times than I would like to admit. I can think of no reason to "do it the hard way".
