My only point of hesitancy with diving into something like this is my strong suspicion/fear that HN has diverged sufficiently enough from Arc that almost all improvements I made to news.arc et al would need manual/refactoring before they would be useful - and this would need to be done every time I tweaked something on my end.

My interest in Arc is motivated solely by the fact that it's what runs HN, and while part of my motivation to dive into HN from a technical standpoint is because I just like doing that :) the rest is just wanting to help the site get out of users' ways, while retaining a pragmatic focus.