Thanks for all the advice, everyone! It looks like I need lots more practice to be able to reliably shoot bugs, though unfortunately it's hardly the season.

Manual focusing does seem a good solution in low light, although it's not really feasible when shooting non-macro subjects. The DA35 has only half a centimeter of focus throw between 0.5 meters and infinity, so it really snaps to the target when the autofocus gets it right, but can hunt for ages if it misses the target and goes through the macro-range on its throw. Equally, the short focus-throw in the non-macro range means I lack the dexterity to focus it manually with any degree of accuracy. I might be able to solve this by deliberately picking contrasty bits of the subject to focus on - I've tried experimenting with that a bit this evening and it's cut down substantially on the focus hunting.

Mike-P: I didn't know that teleconverters would allow the DA35 to achieve more than 1:1 magnification. How much more would the 1.7x allow, in your experience?

I'm running with a compact prime kit (15/35/70) and am generally very happy with the performance of all the lenses; one slight frustration is figuring out how best to use the DA 35/2.8. I've two questions that wiser heads may be able to answer:

If you've had experience using the DA 35/2.8,

1. How do you avoid the camera hunting for focus in low-light? What do you do to prevent it from missing focus, and if it does miss focus, what is your course of action? Do you let it cycle through the entire throw until it finds it, or do you stop it and yank it back to infinity focus so it can try again?
2. If you've had any luck shooting bugs with it, how do you do it? I know one really should use a longer lens for bugs, but I've seen some pretty incredible bug shots with this lens and am wondering what good technique would involve?

Thanks for your time!

I don't have the f/1.4, but do find that (unless you have a non-stock focusing screen) it's pretty difficult to nail the focus if the aperture's wider than f/1.7 in any case. Unless you have incredible eyesight or some kind of focusing aid, I'm not sure the 1.4 offers that much more useable quality over the 1.7.

(Although this may just be my incompetence speaking.)