Indeed. I've been chatting to Adrian about FAPI 2.0, and the vision is
for there to be a separation between 'user-facing forms' and 'data
definitions', and for the data definition system to handle things like
validation. So an import module, for example, could work with the
definition directly, rather than going 'through' a form. This is
closely tied in to the import / export API that I'm working on, as my
Summer of Code project.

@Robrecht: have you heard about this project? I have looked into your
node_import module, and I would love to hear any feedback that you may
have about what you'd like to see in an import / export API. Your
module has already given me plenty of ideas for what should be in such
an API.

Is the code or specs somewhere? I've read your SOC proposal just now, and if it get's implemented right, node_import will only be a few lines... so I'm very much interested :-)