I have already coded most of a Firefox add-on using the Add-on SDK API. I am now discovering that Add-on SDK might not be powerful enough for my purposes. I need two things:
tried Nickolay Ponomarev's XUL with Jetpack without any success whatsover. If anyone knows how to get this working and can point me in the right direction that would be extremely helpful (cfx init --template xul doesn't do anything the regular sdk does when I try it)
I would very much like to hear the detailed description of what you tried and how exactly it failed. I can't answer the question in its current form.
I don't believe either of these is possible with JetPack.
You mean using only the built-in high-level SDK modules. It's possible to write a low-level SDK module that uses XPCOM and interacts with chrome code directly to implement the features you need -- after all that's how the rest of SDK modules are implemented. If you go this route you lose the future compatibility promise of the SDK though -- you'll have to either get it included in the upstream SDK or to update it for the newer Firefox versions yourself.