Ugh, I just spent the last 4 hours trying to track down a bug with scaling in my scene management system. What was really annoying was that translation and orientation was working as expected, and scaling was behaving correctly on everything except the root node. Turns out there was no bug, it was doing exactly what I was telling it to do (which was something other that what I was expecting it to do).

On the bright side, I now have a better understanding of scaling and how it applies to transformation matrices in a spatial hierarchy. Plus it forced me to implement some needed functionality in my logging system - which is what ended up giving me enough information to figure out what was going on.