Can anyone provide any hints, suggestions, or moral support on whether
we're heading in the recommended direction, or whether there's a better
way to obviate the need for our legacy suffix entry using some other
kind of rewriting?
Database relay is designed precisely for this purpose, and I'd be
confident to recommend it to you. There's no way it's going away anytime
soon (if ever; for now, let's just state that it's in 2.3 and 2.4 both),
and "experimental" is likely more documentation issue than reality at this
point. As always, keep up to patch for best results (ITS#4958), but if
you've already migrated to 2.3 it sounds like the heavy lifting is done.