Wonderful, wonderful work, guys! Your experience with doing this stuff is the key here - it's not grunt work. Knowing not only how the builds work, but where all the pieces come from and where and how the changes are made and by whom. Well, there's a lot to it and we're very grateful to those that are willing to invest the time and effort to make this happen.
For anyone else that might be wanting to play with the alphas, I found that I could not get mounting of the sdcard working. What I did that seemed to work was to power the phone down, take the sdcard out of the phone, create one big ext4 partition on it and copy the rom to the sdcard on the computer. Then I could unmount the sdcard on the linux computer and put it back in the phone. Then cwm 6.0.4.5 was able to flash the rom onto the phone. Of course, many things aren't working yet - it's an alpha, after all - but you can boot it and play with it if you have a spare phone that you don't need to actually make phone calls with! LOL