The stable version of OpenSCAD has seemed to work well enough. I ran into some problems when I tried to use a nightly version to get some of the latest features.
I don't think anything about the overall process really ties to it OpenSCAD itself, there are many other parametric script-based modelers. It just happened to be the one I used. It would mean reworking some things, but I could switch to a different one if I needed to.
OpenSCAD is decently reliable up to a certain amount of objects/vertices. Once I reach a limit rendering becomes too slow and sometimes makes OpenSCAD crash. What I ended up doing is to model individual parts (which is a good idea anyway, and OpenSCAD parametric modules work great for that) that I render to STLs individually, then import the STLs for everything but the part I am working on.
Would love to see a 3D print button on your site sometime as well! printtopeer.io/api