While I agree that these things would be nice to have, it would make more sense to start simple...
+1 A thought I recently had was to load the modulles smarter. Instead of loading them all we should think of a way to: * load a module * add the hook_help description output to $descritions[$modulename] * de-include that file (this is the hard part :) * whipe the file from memory (can PHP do that)
I think that this can be done by freading and evalling the modules. Another possibility is to have php files with the module descriptions, so you can just load those. They hould containg 'generic' information about the modules.
If you guys agree on what should be contained in the files - php or plain text I can generate you those for conrib and/or core very quickly - I have the code for that as part of the install/packaging thingie I'm doing.