db-generating function only works in one specific case

This is a more serious issue and needs to be top priority to fix.

The dynamic generation of database files (or technically substitution files) uses hardcoded locations. This works if you're building and installing e3 locally and have wide permissions, but only really then. For our shared build servers, or if you're using cellMode, the files either cannot be created or cannot be found.

I am beginning to think that maybe the dynamic generation needs to be a separate utility, and not available at runtime at all. The problem with having it done at runtime is that neither the repository location nor the installation directory are accessible (don't exist or aren't writable). It could be allowed to write the file to a path relative to where the IOC is started from (essentially pwd; will generally be from /opt/iocs/$IOCNAME), but that may also run into issues if we modify our deployment systems.