Hi Tim,
The path of reinstalling system because of a “bad” hostname selection doesn’t make much sense as a sysadmin. It kind resembles MS OS approach which we truly don’t like.
I invite you to consider on the other hand that this basic/simple UNIX question should be resolved as it is. Very simple. The way I see you guys developed UCR; is the way a configuration should be changed. ucr set hostname="blah" ... is one simple way ( but it doesn't work). UCR is the main difference I see of this distribution from others.
Just my opinion. I will wait your technical instruction to update it.
Rolando Riley