I wish I could put some decks at “low throttle” and some at “high throttle” (say, I want to learn 20 driving code cards a day, but only 3 vim cards). Anki has a setting that says how many new cards you get, but it's global; so either I change that setting all the time (which can be done fairly quickly), or control the influx by leaving stuff in Google Docs.

I just double-checked. You can. Create a new option group for a deck, go to its options, and change the number of new cards, reviewed cards, etc per day. I currently have Latin vocab set to 5 new per day, Japanese vocab set to 10 for instance. (Done through Anki for Windows, unsure if you can set this up through the web or phone).