Tom
have you seen Apache Torque?
I think auto generating validate routines is more useful (and easier) than forms. As you have noticed not all fields are shown to all users. The way around that is to permssion the attributes. While I think all that would be useful it's not that hard to make a form in the first place.
On the other hand it's a pain to write all the validate routines and it's easy to generate them.
I have code that can build oracle database tables from acs_attributes. If there were something that could import and export attributes then you could load up the attributes and build the tables.
