>1) The connection name seems to be inextricably bound to the view. Can't even hack the .DBC for this one. That means I can't switch to an alternate database unless I point my ODBC DSN to another machine with a database of the same name. Any elegant ways around this?

Unfortunately, you have to completely recreate the view for this. (VFP changes this with a new CONNSTRING clause with USE).

You can use EView to generate code that will recreate the view from scratch, and 'parameterize' this code to swap out connections.