TimeMachine woes: can’t migrate, can’t restore

I have a bunch of valid TimeMachine backups on a drive. The backups are from a Mac OS X 10.6.3 server install that used to run on a VMWare Fusion virtualized machine. That VM was corrupted due to a host crash, which resulted in an unreadable virtual disk image. And now the problems start, going on a week and no end in sight. Problem 1) Trashing the corrupted virtual disk image, creating a new one, booting from the Mac OS X Server install DVD and trying to restore the TimeMachine backup to this new virtual drive fails because TimeMachine says that this backup was created on a machine with different hardware. That's a bunch of crap, because the VM configuration wasn't changed. It's not even a new VM, just a new virtual disk image. Needless to say, trying to restore that backup onto a physical computer fails with the same message. What's the point here? I can yank out a pre-installed Mac OS X Server disk and stick it into virtually any model Mac and things will just work. So then why these counter productive restrictions restoring backups? Problem 2) Installing Mac OS X Server onto a new machine (virtual or physical) and migrating data from the TimeMachine backup fails, because during "upgrading services", some sort of error occurs, and Mac OS X Server says it can't migrate and must be rebooted. What comes to life after the reboot is a half-assed non-functional configuration. So now all my data is held hostage by a TimeMachine backup, and I can't properly restore it. Currently my only option is to use a tool like Back-in-Time to bypass the artificial restrictions and restore the latest snapshot to a physical drive and then restore the server configuration and databases from what's stored in /.ServerBackup. Unfortunately /usr/sbin/ServerBackup also doesn't seem to do its work, or it's woefully inadequately documented. (see my post elsewhere in these forums) If anyone knows how to trick/force TimeMachine into restoring without checking for "compatible hardware", that would be a great step forward. Anyone who knows how to restore the various configuration databases etc. from what's in /.ServerBackup in the various TimeMachine backup snapshots would also help a lot. Backup is kind of useless if the restore is restrictive to the point of being impossible.