Update-
Now have my 2nd batch since restarting brewing in the fermentor. Also first use of both a homemade hopstopper (worked PERFECTLY) as well as the 1st use of the hopback. It was also my first partial mash. Many many things that could have gone wrong due to sheer inexperience.
The hopback is AWESOME. I put 4 oz of leaf hops in it and could have put in more. It even had low enough resistance to drain very well via gravity (which led to some unexpected wort loss as I attempted to prime the pump and didn't bother to watch downstream lines until I saw wort pouring out of the counterflow chiller-- oops). The bottleneck in my procedure is the CFC which REALLY slows things down, and eventually I hop to get a therminator.
The biggest problem came from a different kind of equipment failure. This was my 1st partial mash (hurray!) ever, and I was attempting to use a cooler for the various steps. Unfortunately, the cooler does NOT hold heat well. I was using an infusion mash for 4 lbs of grain, and did both a glycan rest and a protein rest since I was using both flaked wheat and flaked rye. Unfortunately, while I was VERY impressed with how accurate the instructions were in beersmith for temperatures and volumes of infusion, and I hit the right temperatures right off the bat, the damn thing cooled rapidly and by the end of the step, the temp was way low. So I topped up with hot water to get it back to the right temp. This of course threw off the volume for the next infusion, and so on and so on. It just built and built and eventually my volumes were massive- I was worried that I was going to run out of space in my 28 qt cooler.
So I overshot my volume by a HUGE amount (more than a gallon more than I wanted), so instead of having an OG of 1.094, I have 1.080. Oh well, maybe the next thing I need to get is a decent cooler.
But I am very thrilled to report that the hopback is absolutely FANTASTIC. Low resistance, extremely easy to clean, and with silicone gaskets, can be sterilized by just baking in the oven!
Anyway, thanks for everyone's comments!
Klaus