Simple Storage Service

I'm upgrading a large Drupal 5 system to run under Drupal 7 on AWS, and am trying to figure out the best practice for setting up the public files that used to be in sites/default/files.

I'm looking at a couple of the modules available for using S3 as the storage back end, and am beginning to think there has to be a better way to do this. That, or those of you who are doing large sites are doing something seriously custom that isn't making its way back into modules like AmazonS3.