So, I finally got it working over the weekend :)
Marcus is a genius, and it turns out that libgphoto2 has mass-storage device detection support which just so happens to touch HAL in just the right way that it screws up banshee’s HAL device pointer. I haven’t taken the time to debug this, but it starts working when I remove the disk.so library from libgphoto2_port. SO…for the time being, it’s starting to work :)
Since we don’t have track metadata yet, everything is associated by Title=filename and Artist=foldername…but it is working :) Track write support works like a charm – and once libgphoto2 is ready to transfer metadata with it, I’ll make a release for folks to test things out with :)