[development] recursive book functionality?

[Derek Wright]

anyone ever heard of (or worked on) efforts to make the book module 
function more recursively? by this, i mean:

1) "add child page" should inherit all the node metadata of the parent 
page (publishing options, access control/node visibility settings, etc)

2) providing a way to do an operation on a book page and all its 
children recursively (like setting a publishing option, ACL, etc).

is this new territory?  any suggestions before i roll up my sleeves and 
start hacking?  is book going to be completely deprecated in the short 
term by new-fangled "views + cck makes everything obsolete" talk? ;)  
i'm hopeful that i can do all this as a contributed 
"recursive_book.module" that just uses nodeapi and form_alter().  am i 
being naive to think that's all i need?  any suggestions on a better 
name for the contrib module? (can you tell i'm a computer scientist for 
my day job, not a web designer?) ;)

any wisdom or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

anyone else care about this functionality?  anyone know of anyone who'd 
be willing to pay for it? ;)

thanks!
-derek (dww)