Or will the structures and everything we are using now be basically the same? Are there any big advantages to modders having access to fully offline servers with online lobby capability?
Biggest one I can think of is that you can mod, run the server, mod, run the server, etc, without any delay to wait to upload the mod to the server. Second biggest is (I'm not sure about how this one works yet) the possibility of getting direct feedback from the server with regards to crashing etc.
Yea, debugging and how to set up a quick-iteration environment is something that needs to be in a tutorial by someone who knows whats going on with modding here. I am totally clueless on how I can set up my environment to be efficient and to deal with bugs/iterating quickly.
The server does spit out a crash log, not sure where it's directed to. Or if it still does with our version, I know we do get a client crash log.
Largely I think it will be the same, however some types of mod may require the server to be local. I can also see situations where a mod could be made in something like java to babysit and change the local server settings on the fly. The latter shouldn't be on PAMM, the former shouldn't be on PAMM unless we can make a clear distinction between Uber and local servers.