In reply to Chip Bennett.

This could be done in bits perhaps, as implementing all of this stuff for core in one hit would be quite an undertaking.

The thing which annoys me the most, is how much jumping through hoops I need to do to create a simple meta box. But having said, there are a huge number of different types of potential meta boxes, so anything created to do that would need to be fairly extensible in itself. I'm not sure off the top of my head what the best approach to doing that would be, but it must be possible to at least make a system which handles validation callbacks and nonces automatically to ensure developers aren't bypassing security systems (which often happens due to developers not figuring out how to handle those things correctly).

Do you have any ideas on how you would go about implementing this type of thing Chip?