Not sure about the specifics but yes, in cases like the one I described in my oriignal post, the "header" state will not change immediately but some kind of ser

Not sure about the specifics but yes, in cases like the one I described in my oriignal post, the "header" state will not change immediately but some kind of service thread would periodically revisit the active headers (i.e. anything that had not reached the final stable state) and check all the items in order to update the header state. That worked fine for us. Also, I have recently (< six months ago) used a SM to build a module in the application I am working on and I am quite happy how it allowed us to quickly adapt to the corner cases that inevitably started cropping up after deploying the module. I am fairly convinced that a different approach would have make been much more difficult to adapt, and that testing for subtle interactions of different states would have been much more complicated.