It think it entirely depends on exactly what you want to do. You may be able to get what you want quickly without the CR. Since no one but you knows what you want to do, answers will just be vague conjecture. Since I haven't seen any sophisticated examples using the CR, I assume it is either difficult to use or it doesn't satisfy the needs of developers. Also the CR doesn't do much to satisfy your desire to create a portable export of the data. I would think this would be the first task, and then figure out how to translate it into the database and back out again.
