To put it into perspective, the I'm calling for the following major changes:[...]
2) move the loop that used to spin around and ask kernelspace if there was anything to expire into the VFS as well, where it won't be killed.[...]
(1) and (2) shouldn't be hard at all to do considering David Howells has done the majority of this already. (3) is needed in order to manage direct mounts properly for when they are 'covered'. Admittedly, (4) comes off as an ugly hack.
Also, (2) was the only 'active' task the automount daemon was doing. Everything else it did can be rewritten in the form of a usermode helper that runs only when it is needed. This simplifies the userspace code a lot.