I could see supporting the editing of app-specific routes. But as you note, this requires a web server restart which could trip people up.
I still have a very difficult time restarting web2py. Is that something that could be triggered in admin? This also might suggest that app-specific routing should be "On" by default. That doesn't necessarily mean there has to exist an app-specific routes.py file but if one is added, it wold get used without needing to set up routing at the web2py level. Or is that how it already works?

