The application is working in production mode on IE 9, but still, minimal "hello world" application with steal is not working id dev (natural) mode.

Did you ever get this to work.  I believe I am encountering the same issue.  Application works fine in dev mode but steal.build production version does not load library dependencies in correct order and fails.

Is this with the old steal?  If so, please try to upgrade to the new StealJS.  You can even get a bitovian on a hangout to help.

Yes, unfortunately, it is "old Steal".  Also, unfortunately, I have looked into upgrading and it's too extensive a change to our build process at this time to complete in time for our load.  I'm having issues with IE9 and what appears to be loading timing or dependency issues with my "steal-built" production version (dev works fine).  Specifically, when run, I get an error in form_params.js that $.fn.extend does not exist and it happens right after the steal line (line 1 in form_params.js) that steals "jquery").

We're a large, slow-moving, process-change-aversion, oss-scared organization. And unfortunately, because of our schedule, this isn't the time to try and accomplish this if it's not plug-n-play.  And from what I've read, with our setup, there's going to be lots of moving parts.

But, here are a few of my concerns:

Right now, with "old steal", we have the development and production (steal-built) versions running pretty smoothly.  We have cache-busting implemented in our production builds and everything works fine (except for our IE bug).  From reading the docs/forums, I couldn't readily figure out if true cache-busting (filename-changing [e.g., production.js -> production.1234123423.js], not version adding [?v1]) was even supported--seemed like the "was coming".

The migration guide talked about making changes in the stealconfig.js settings but it was never really apparent that we could keep our stealconfig.js setup and just plug in the new stealJS.  Our dev and prod versions have different setups so that we can use dev and prod versions of all the plugins we use as well.  For dev buillds it uses stealconfig.js in the base directory, for production it ignores stealconfig.js and index.html contains a steal object that maps the production (minified) versions of the libraries/plugins.  Is this still doable with new stealJS?