Server :: Writing Debian Init Script For Process That Has No Syslog Integration?

I have inherited ownership of a Debian server process that logs its error message to stdout/stderr. Currently its initscript has lines like:

start-stop-daemon [options] --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_ARGS < /dev/null 2>&1 | logger $LOG_OPTIONS 2> /dev/null &

I have tried to abstract as much of that away as possible. The options specify a pid file, to make a pid file. A subsequent line tries to establish whether the process is up, though I think several conditions are not checked for. This script seems pretty ropey to me. I am trying to start again with the lsb-base one in /etc/init.d/skeleton though that is going to require a lot of modification. get the code change to use the syslog API however that is out of the question at least for now.

1.) Create a named pipe
2.) Start up a logger daemon that reads from the named pipe
3.) start up the server process that writes to the named pipe

It would be ideal for this if start-stop-daemon offered options to specify where the IO of the daemon process should be redirected to. However I am not about to offer to adopt that package (with ~400 bugs) so I doubt that will happen. Trying to specify the redirection on the command line does not work. In the case of the logger daemon start-stop-daemon seems to hang on the system call. In the case of the server process the pipe gets closed when start-stop-daemon exits, so the logger daemon exits. None of that seems surprising.So what I am doing now is to write simple wrapper scripts for the server and logger processes. Both wrapper scripts have this structure:

1.) sanity check the arguments
2.) exec program [suitable redirection of IO]

Then the start-stop-daemon can call the wrapper scripts as daemons. From my experiments so far this seems to work. However I feel a bit uncomfortable with this. It introduces several new wrapper scripts.I cannot think of any obvious security holes but I suppose race conditions are inevitable.