Interesting reading :-). Thanks for summarizing all this information.
I think it is a good idea to add 1, 2, 4, 5 and 7 in the documentation in some form, but not just in the config file. As for 3 - we should really fix the code to be more flexible and recognize properly all version strings and remove step 3 completely :-). One clarification though - there is no need to edit converter-agent.xml file, converter-worker.xml should be enough (I guess we should update the default agent configuration file as well).