Is there a way to set the agent group so that if there are agents available, and their recovery timer has expired that the caller does not hear the initial announcement for the agent group, and they go direclty into ringing one of the available agents?

Well, then don't record the annoucement number 0, just record number 1 (e.g. *98123*0 and *98123*1). The special about number 0 is that is always played back, especially in the case you are mentioning.

The problem with not recording 0 is that then when someone does hit the queue because the agents are busy, then callers just hear music with no explination of what is going on with their call for the first 20 seconds or so. If you decrease the timer, then they are constantly hearing the recordings, and not the background music.

Well the first time someone enters the queue should be only half of the waiting time. But I get the point. Maybe we should extend the syntax for the waiting time and say the first number if for all prompts and the second (if present) specially for the first prompt. Default would still be the duration divided by 2.

Gap between announcements (s): 20 5

Would mean: Usually wait 20 seconds, and for the first prompt wait 5 seconds. What do you think?

Sounds like a great solution

Another Idea I had (which only partially fixed the problem) was to have the trunk send to the extension, and set the extension to busy call forward to the agent group. The 2 prblems this brings up is that there are not service flag fields in the extension, so it rings endlessly after hours, and the extension cannot have voicemail.

Probably it is easier to have the functionality explicitly like stated above (is already included in the latest 3.0 build).