Changes made during CR of 299

Here is a collection of small changes I implemented while CRing 299. The most interesting is probably the nice opportunity to use a little bit of RX. This is a good example of where it is a useful API, to "debounce" requests by 1 second (i.e. collect all requests but only respond to the last one after X time units). The PublishSubject sits there for the duration of the service, and passively receives events when required. However, it only emits events to the subscriber after one second because before subscribig we ask it to debounce events.