PTJim:

Brandon, thanks for the pointer to the MDK info page; it's pretty informative.  I'm not a potential developer, but very happy to see the info there for those who are.

And FWIW, I like MetaStock 9.1 very much for what it is and think it's well worth what I paid for it, and for the few plugins I own.  I just hate seeing it sit still unimproved in terms of the user interface and competitors' feature set.

In fact, I'm considering investing $1,200 in TradeSim Enterprise to perform functions well beyond the pitifully-limited backtesting included in MS.  My personal opinion is that relying on the simplistic backtesting features of MS would likely lead one to very erroneous conclusions about system validity and performance.  Of couse, I see other companies promoting their backtesting too, with similarly-limited capabilities.

Buy or license TradeSim, release MetaStock 11 with something like that, modernize the user interface, add a quotation window linked to whatever quote server and charts we're using now and voila - you've really got something.