Serving RTP Multicast audio stream via pulseaudio on headless mpd controlled server

So, after years of cursing pulseaudio and fighting it on various desktops and laptops, I thought I'd finally found a real use case for this incredible peace of software:

I want to serve my music collection from my headless server placed in the basement over multicast and control it via mpd (music player daemon). This in order to achieve synchronized playback on several devices (ie. in different rooms in my house).

Of course, I have searched the web and this forum, and have found several places with more or less relevant information on how to get this up and running on a Fedora box (I currently run F17 on that server, but will upgrade to F18/F19/Centos if that makes things easier). But at each new obstacle my motivating degraded, and here I am, asking fellow fedorians for advise.

Background
Currently, I have a Nokia N900 connected to some loudspeakers in the living room, running mpd (on the N900) with music served over nfs (wifi) from the server in the basement. I can control the music from any of my devices, selecting songs from a large playlist (from Android, Nokia N9, Linux, Windows, etc) It works great, thanks Sebastian Montabone!

What I want now, is the same functionality, but want to have the sound synchronized in different rooms, ie. when played on different devices.

Setup

• Headless server in the basement, with music collection, running mpd (to be controlled by various mpd clients), feeding playback to a pulseaudio RTP sink (Real-time Transport Protocol)
• Multiple receivers of this multicast stream, located in different rooms, attached to separate loudspeakers. These devices are all Linux based with pulseaudio installed. The Nokia N900 will be one of them.

The first obstacle was to let the mpd user start pulseaudio. That seems quite hard to solve (on a Fedora system), when there is no X11 up and running. From what I have learned from Bug 461546 (eg. comment 37) this not something one is even supposed to be allowed doing on Fedora. The Fedora pulseaudio maintainer (Lennart Poettering) think this setup is plain "stupid" and "shouldn't be done" (see eg. WhatIsWrongWithSystemWide)

My current show stopper is that I have not been able to run pulseaudio on my headless server in any usable form, even though I have allowed normal login for the mpd user, and have created my wanted setup under ~mpd/.pulse/default.pa. I simply cannot get passed the
error.
My inspiration and hope is this very nice writeup by rozzin.

My question is this: How do I achieve the same thing in Fedora?