But it's not clear to me from a casual glance at the the docs whether Distelli lives inside the container during those hooks? That's part of the distinction of the Autopilot Pattern is making the higher-level orchestration layer as thin as possible.
(As far as the root, some of it is derived from my experiences as a perhaps-foolishly-early adopter of Docker in prod at my previous gig at a streaming media startup. The rest is derived from both principals with which Joyent's own Triton infra is built and our experiences speaking with enterprise devs and ops teams.)