great article Dave. Having spent a lot of time with a few php cms's lately I sympathise greatly with the issue - becuase even when putting in sample content some ui's just suck for time efficiency.
i think we have a few basic design goals:
* limit the number of clicks for all operations - pooling as many choices as possible onto the one page
* keep the look and feel across similar functins as similar as possible
* provide "bulk" options - like bulk upload, tickbox clicking in the tree view for bulk deletes/moves etc.
* consistant naming across all functions (a big failure of existing systems)
there are probably more, where did i put that Jacob Nielson book...
