MultiBlog and Permalinks … still stuck in the mud

do you know, i really can’t get my head around why the permalinks don’t work ok with any structure. all the mod_rewrite seems to do is take any old url and make it go to index.php with everything else appended as a query string.
if that’s the case, then the permalink structure _should_ be only parsed _after_ the database is loaded and the permalink structural options are parsed.
i’m going to have to dig into the code base itself to get this. i have a horrible suspicion that permalink parsing may be done _before_ the database options are loaded or perhaps without reference to them. but why, I ask myself….