Lastly, is there any chance of allowing dots `.` in worker names instead of hyphens `-`?
Possibly but could you tell me why that change is important to you?
It's really more for consistency as a fallback server. This way if I do use maxbtc as backup I only need to change the ip of my miner to point to it. Otherwise I'd have to change the worker name as well and that becomes another room for error.
Add both pools to the config with one as failover? Then you dont have to change anything.