I hope my walls of text don't squelch the discussions... the posts in here so far have been constructive and well thought out.
LibTalentQuery sounds neat; I suspect someone pointed me to it at some point already. the idea of a buncha addons sharing data through a library sounds exciting. Blizzard providing that capacity in the native API would be even more exciting, but, that's not exactly within our control
Note to self; look into LibTalentQuery!