I spend time on moodle.org in bursts. 5-10 hours in one week and nothing for weeks. There's my explanation for not responding sooner. Sorry.
First, I want to say that I like the 2.3 F2F a lot (as compared to the 1.9 version). It integrates instructor assignment into each section, so I can set a list of people who teach in enrollment and then select which one actually taught the course. 1.9 allowed no instructor assignment...we countered that on our current site (1.9) with a duplicated but re-named attendes table for instructors and you sign instructors up the same way as students but for different "credit." The 2.3 method is better, simpler and prettier. But it is a LOT different. Our custom work on the 2.3 module was from scratch, since the new plugin is nothing like the old, other than output.
Outside of this thread, the developer-code guy I work with found some custom course fields options through a totara plugin. I can't tell you the specifics but it allows you to create custom fields in course settings for each course and to define options...we sometimes have 30 minute courses to 160 hour courses...we used it to set hours for each course, and if you have completed all requirements for completion, you get that number of hours.
This means we don't have to rely on F2F and certificate for our hours (since we do both on-line and classroom training) and make convoluted reports to figure out who has what. We're also going to use a Configurable Report plugin...Let's hope I can get my tiny brain around it. I hate sql and schemas and all that noise. But I don't see a way to get what I want without it. So far, we have a couple configurables our developer set up and they can report the course hours upon completion from the plugin, which is pretty nifty.
Unfortunately, using the totara custom course fields also means it causes some sort of errors (like removing the ability to delete courses) which requires more code hijinks and may impair upgrading functionality.
We also sometimes set up courses for topics with several f2f sections then the report just adds the hours each person got by totalling duration of all the sections they have credit in. Using the totara custom course fields, we have to create a course for every section, unless everyone enrolled goes to all the sections (which they won't), otherwise people won't get credit. Based on these two issues, we might be re-evaluating doing this and going back to convolution despite the convenience. Sigh.