Oh yeah, I found that out quickly. I suppose what I meant when I said I was spending two weeks researching them was that I was spending two weeks researching all the aspects of rooting in general, not just recovery images.
I am not worried about the process of rooting at all. I have that down to a great understanding. The only thing has bothered me lately was the article i read about passwords being stored in plain text on your Sprint HTC Hero. Thus, if you granted access rights to a root app that wanted to look at that it could potentially send those passwords back to the developer. However, I am pretty sure that by reading the access privileges before installing any root app would let you know if it was going to try to access something suspicious. Also, I am certain a rogue root app that was dangerous to your handset's security would be discussed in these forums.