Does anyone have any practical long term experience with third party alternatives to the (must be made from solid gold) Cisco SFP-GE-S module that they'd like to share with me? I suppose I could just use compatible GLC-SX-MM instead, but I kind of want to have DOM support.

There are plenty of vendors which can sell you SFPs which are "Cisco coded" (i.e. the Cisco switches don't complain), have DOM support and are much more reasonably priced than Cisco. We have had good experience with Zycko. Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no