I was half a click away from saying this sounded familiar before I reread the Adrian's original post and realizing it was a revisit. I liked the idea before and still do. +1
It would also seem you could also get some performance boosts by doing some lazy loading and only load the realms used on a page. It should decrease the memory footprint return smaller data sets from the database etc. It would probably be a minor benefit but very helpful in larger sites.
James Gilliland