I have a couple questions that I would like answered. I have tried searching these forums and while I have found some answers it's not clear to me how to achieve what I am trying to do.
If you haven't yet, don't forget to read
In-Game DKP Mod, which is the official documentation on the GRSS.
* Ability to assign DKP differently whether a person is in the instance or on standby. It is acceptable to do this by hand, but it would be nice to do this via the GRSS mod.
This can definitely be done, though, as you said, it needs to be done manually during the upload. You'll notice that the location of the player is listen when uploading. You can use this to determine the location, and whether or not they were in the instance or on their way. Additionally, the "Guild List" also lists members who were online but not in the raid (a Waiting list section is in development). Next to each character name is a text box. In that box, you can enter an overwrite amount. That is, whatever you enter in the box will be given to the member.
* To this day it seems impossible to get people to sign up for events, so I can't rely on the calendar.
Are you asking for something here, or just stating that as one of the things about your guild? If you're just stating it, no need to respond to this section, I'm just trying to determine what, if anything, you're asking.
* Raids must be tracked as events.
I'm afraid that's just the terminology of the site. I agree it's a little backwards right now, any maybe eventually that'll get changed. But right now, it's a "Calendar Event" contains "Raids" where a "Raid" can be considered a boss attempt or kill.
* As little administrative work as possible, e.g. a lua file upload and a few administrative steps are acceptable.
That's certainly the goal of the GRSS upload. To compare, before the GRSS was built, entering a Molten Core Raid for my guild took something like 45 minutes. After the GRSS was implemented, uploading a raid took around 5 minutes.
* Ability to assign DKP in a static fashion, e.g. per event. For instance, if we down Tidewalker and a few members switch out for Fathomlord, I want to count all those participants as members of the raid. Our guild policy is that they get full DKP awards.
That's not the easiest to do with the current system, admittedly. A Not-bad idea to answer this would be a "Raid Merger" where all members of the selected raids can be merged into a single one.
* DKP is always accrued and accounted for after each event.
Most importantly is that I can use all raid snapshots (per boss) and record those members as part of the event. I would like to not have to go to the raid->event utility on the website each time we raid. This is cumbersome, I would like to automate this.
What you can do, after uploading the file, the next page has a drop down for "Associated Event". Select the event, then when uploading, simply give 0 points for each snapshot. (This will at least give you a breakdown of who's present for what parts of the raid)
Then, on the calendar, click the Event, then from the drop down box, choose "full attendee List". This will list anyone who was present for any of the raids. And from there, you'll need to manually record that list in a new DKP Raid. On THAT raid, award points.
One thing to keep in mind, the "Raid-Event associator" does not merge the raids into a single one, it only associates the raids with an event.
Am I making any sense at all?