Software is fundamentally flawed

So, after a week of trying to get the XLoBorg accelerometer to respond in fashion dictated by the datasheet for the chip,it turns out that smbus, or rather the Pi's SoC (BM2835) does not support repeated START sequences, making it almost useless for chip control on the i2c bus. There is a good discussion at http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/7138/mma8452-i2c-module for the curious.

I tried both the XLoBorg smbus wrapper and the Quick2Wire Python 3 library with similar results. Using the Perl HiPi utility as suggested in the above link, does indeed verify that all is not well. For the very curious, insert the following at line 159of the XloBorg.py file:

    #check whoami
    bus.write_byte(addressAccelerometer, 0x0D)
    ret = bus.read_byte(addressAccelerometer)
    if ret != 0x2A:
        Print('Cannot match whoami data byte')
        Print(ret)
        sys.exit()

It will fail because the read is apparently done from register 0x00 (the default base) instead of the requested 0x0D,and returns 0xFF instead of the expected 0x2A. Using HiPi gets the correct result for the chip (0x2A) e.g.
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ hipi-i2c read 0 0x1C 0x0D
42

As an aside,I'm not sure that the lines starting L 151 in XLoBorg.py will work

    # System state
    register = 0x0B             # SYSMOD
    data = 0x01                 # Awake mode
    try:
        bus.write_byte_data(addressAccelerometer, register, data)
    except:
        Print('Failed sending SYSMOD!')

as according to the datasheet for the MMA8452Q, that is a read only register. That is my reading of it, and happy to accept I may be wrong, being new to chip programming. HiPi shows no change after a write to that register for comparison. i.e.
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ hipi-i2c write 0 0x1C 0x0B 1
2
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ hipi-i2c read 0 0x1C 0x0B
1
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ hipi-i2c write 0 0x1C 0x0B 2
2
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ hipi-i2c read 0 0x1C 0x0B
1

Anyway, XloBorg.py appears to work, but not necessarily for the reasons the designer thought!