Proposal

Scrap the current method of script loading, it's causing too many issues, and it's hard to get things loaded the way you want.  There's tons of posts about people trying to load plugins and things that rely on jQuery, it shouldn't be this hard.

So:
Remove the RadScriptManager as the primary loader of core scripts, let the RadControls use it and that's all.  Create your own control which we can dump somewhere in the header or on the page and functions like the JavaScriptEmbed control....perhaps it's just a collection of JSE controls.  The nice part about the JSE control is you can render in the header or footer, not the crappy RSM rendering in the body tag...keep in mind while still maintaining the ResourceLinks functionality of only rendering the script into the page once.

Then in the backend UI or the control itself, we can specify the load order of the scripts and where we want their src to come from.  The problem with the frontend is that it'd be hard to specify the "core" scripts that always have to be there.  Where the backend could have them so you can't delete, just re-order.  It could be really slick with KendoUI drag\drop reorder (or something).  Perhaps you could specify them as "Bundles" and then in the control on our pages we could point at the bundle we want.

Like we run into problems where you want to have scripts load in this order
- jQuery
- KendoUI CDN
- Custom Embedded Scripts
In the current implementation you can't do this...because everything "magically" happening in the background and getting packed into .axd files you can't inject a file into the load order.

Please think about it :) ...help make things easier for us client side users.
Steve