Dave,
yes, I think it might make sense for the APM to prompt for parameter settings upon installation and instantiation. This does not necessarily imply that installation and instantiation cannot be done non-interactively, only that the user has the opportunity to change default parameter values at the point in time when it makes the most sense.
The way we currently solve this issue, for example for the Bug Tracker, is that a package instance detects when it is used for the first time and prompts an admin to do configuration. This works, but it's not the ideal solution.
As far as I can remember Bryan Quinn who designed the APM at ArsDigita had just this feature that Dave is requesting in mind but it never got implemented. I remember Bryan offering a t-shirt to whoever would implement those missing APM features. Dave - you should call him on that offer 😊
Btw, speaking of APM parameters, something that would be nice would be to have site-wide package parameters (the equivalent of a static variable for a class in object oriented programming). Not sure how urgently we need that feature though and it's also not really relevant to this discussion.
