Manually cherry-pick some changes from

https://github.com/hypothesis/h/commit/c2286994a215283addd86170851e4cabf3e97ca9
https://github.com/hypothesis/h/commit/1ff5505f3b019e2abd21b6920a388d798c0acc58
https://github.com/hypothesis/h/commit/fa9351f02c996cebf8a10f1ef8bb8bbaa1035286

This partially takes care of
 * Problem 1 described in #578. (The two code path are not yet consolidated, but at least now they do the same)
 * Problem 3 (The reloading is now a separate method.)