Thanks for the patience as I work through being sick and having my kiddo out of daycare. 
Starting to explore a more general feature for servers to communicate settings to clients sounds like a good next step.
I strongly agree that we will need to keep evolving server-client specifications and that if we can find ways to be more agile about it that will have a lot of user benefits.
I’m going to need to step away from this for a bit as I prioritize Collect will need to stop using /sdcard/odk for files - #7 by seadowg. We need to start making changes towards scoped storage to stay in the Play Store.