Would you consider enabling scripted Photoshop to run headless?

Question

Is there ANY chance of having Photoshop run headless?
The Application.visible and Application.displayDialogs properties do not provide airtight control over photoshop's interaction with the desktop.
Even when they are set to false and No, Ps still shows the splash screen and puts up progress bar pop-ups like Reading Photoshop Format and Rasterizing.
Any chance the Application constructor could be overloaded as shown below?
     Application(bool runInBackground)
Eg.
     // Manipulate a file COMPLETELY in the background...
     // ...and it is acceptible if only one thread can be active on Application at once;
     // client application will be responsible for preventing concurrent callers
     Application app = new Application(false);
     app,Open( someDocument );
     app, doSomething;
     app.ActiveDocument.Close(psSaveBehavior.psAlwaysSave);
[An alternative design would be to have photoshop.exe honor the /Automation switch by going UI-less--setting Application.visible to true would turn on the UI.]
Regards,
Pete
(phone number available upon request)

Answer 1

I'm very much willing to be corrected by someone with inside knowledge and I may be completely off here, but I think a big part of the cross-platform aspect of Photoshop is to a large extent still handled simply by having duplicate code for interface elements like dialog boxes for each platform and things like that. The newer parts seem to be different, but especially the older portions of the code and many of the filters still seem to contain a lot of that (just look at the Displace effect). Maintainig a codebase that has historically grown and been subjected to tight deadlines countless times is a bigger challenge than most people realize.
Reading between the lines of what Adobe has communicated over the last years would indicate that they initially set out to really modernize everything during the Cocoa transition (which was planned to span several release cycles), to do a clean separation between the internals and the interface and to create a cross-platform widget toolkit abstraction layer (at some point, I think they considered to transition to the interface toolkit used in the digital video applications like After Effects and Premiere), but basically, halfway into the process, Apple changed course with the discontinuation of 64-Bit Carbon and thus left Adobe in the cold. Lack of a 64-Bit version for OS X had been generating a significant amount of bad press at that point, too (largely based on misinformed assumptions of what magic and amazing things 64-Bit would offer). The Photoshop engineering team then attempted the impossible and initially tried to implement all the modernizations in one cycle, but halfway through they realized there was no way they were going to make it and decided to go with more or less a direct port of the old Carbon code to Cocoa for the time being. If they hadn't done that, there would have been no Photoshop CS5.
The introduction of the unified panel docking system in CS3 (they are referring to it as "Adobe OWL" I think) and later the application frame was the first step of many towards modernizing the entire interface code and unifying the UI of all the suite applications (before, each application had its own separate implementation of the panel system, and suddenly owning a bunch of former Macromedia products probably didn't improve that situation either). The new dark interface and the new panel-based filters in CS6 seems to be their next logical step. Right now each application appears to still be using its own toolkit for dialog boxes and such, some of them possibly even a lot more than one, and some seem to even use the OS APIs directly (I'm not sure I really want to know all the gory details). Then there is ScriptUI, way too many of those awful Flash/Flex dialog boxes/panels and apparently even the toolbar in the Flash IDE itself, toolkits used by shared libraries that are used in more than one application, the installer and licensing system (I think those are using HTML/WebKit for some reason), then plug-ins and so on. I think someone on the internet once made a list with all the different types of sliders in Photoshop's UI, and there were quite a few of them.
I'm sure the folks at Adobe are doing their very best to modernize and unify all the applications within the constraints of the resources they can afford to dedicate to that kind of task, but I imagine it is quite hard to sell upgrades and pay the bills by telling users "brand new version: nothing new, but now using much more elegant code to do exactly the same thing as before, and you only had to wait six years, and we only killed five engineers in the process! buy now!".