Yay! That fixed it for me too!
So, I'm thinking if you do plan on cleaning things up and releasing it at some point as a hack, that it would be best to gather up the "settings" into one file or at the top of the sphinx include. For example I have a multi server setup, so I specify the searchd server's ip rather than localhost, and I've renamed my indexes. To the average joe they might not notice or know how to make those changes to get things working. I'm going to do some more testing later on but things are looking very good