Understood; It doesn't matter to me what you use, I was just rambling as usual
Anyway, I've also been working on a program loader (in C), and one of the things I've just recently started working on is "an851d", which is just a server that pretends to be a PIC18F8722 with IFI's boot loader. By connecting my two serial ports together, I've been able to test it extensively without having to worry about screwing up our team's FRC, and have squashed a few bugs I couldn't have (reasonably) otherwise. If you're interested in using it to test I'd be glad to release the source before I release it all together (it's about 95% done).
It basically just responds to any valid bootloader command it gets and prints out information about what commands its received (see picture).