In order for the whole pipelines thing to work, i had to introduce a distinction between frontend & backend rendering contexts. we already had this distinction in our renderers (via an 'admin' property), but it had to be explicitly noted in the pipeline and application logic in order to make everything work.

delineating between the two is a bit tricky. it's pretty clear to me that at this point, we do NOT want to offer any interface-driven control/support for applying pipeline logic to backend rendering situations. it's much better just to pass through to the admin renderer and let it run its course as normal. however, it's more trouble to special case the admin logic to bypass pipelines, so it's better to just hardcode the path through the pipelines layer to always use a minimal renderer config. this also opens the door for letting us include backend renderers more properly in the pipeline ecosystem without needing to answer some of the difficult questions it entails right now.

i'll post some code that makes this a bit clearer presently.

what needs doing is a review to make sure that we've tucked in all the corners on the frontend/backend distinction. this whole system will be complicated enough without having this particular thing poking out the sides.