Also Classified Ads may've been written as part of the 4.x development process (back in the Ars Digita days) before the CMS merge with ACS 4 was completed.
We are planning to mainstream the CMS widget/attributes stuff and the way they're used to allow autogeneration of forms and other good stuff over the next few months. They're definitely not out of date but rather we'd like to see this functionality extended to all objects.
