Don,
Great news. I definitely want to get as many developers from the community involved as possible, even if it is just to comment on the plans and implementation, although anyone who wishes to contribute code won't be turned away.
You are correct about the CMS package. There are a few items that can be reused from CMS. Many of the procedures make assumptions about how a CMS should work internally, which I think should be avoided, but we can definitely take inpiration from the general functions that are provided in the old CMS package.
Also, some of the functionality is tied to the user interface pages and not exposed as an API at all. I think the point is that BCMS or whatever comes from it will be the most basic operations needed to use the content repository and then it can be expanded as we learn more about how the content repository is used.
