Hello Andrew,
this is fine with me, let's hear what marek thinks. BTW, there are excellent batman dissectors for wireshark, have you tried them already?
The B.A.T.M.A.N. dissector is in Wireshark 1.2, but the B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced dissector is still waiting in https://bugs.wireshark.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=2631 and/or http://gitorious.org/wireshark-batman-plugins/wireshark-batman-adv
And I think that it is still a good idea to have tcpdump dissectors as you maybe want to have live output over your seriell interface on you embedded device without much hassle.
Best regards, Sven