I like the idea, Brent, since I have gotten to liking the Debian approach to upgrading your system. Unfortunately, there is good news and bad news on that front. The good news is that at least one ArsDigita is working on templates for the ACS, I think in much the way that you propose. It is described as:
The dynamic publishing system is a substrate for team development of web applications. It maintains a strict separation between data processing and presentation, allowing developers and designers to work together more effectively. The system handles both content pages as well as most forms.
For more on that, see
http://karl.arsdigita.com/projects/template/doc/ (I sure hope that Karl doesn't mind people getting links to his stuff!)
The bad news is that at least one of the other ArsDigitans (Jin) has said that separating out Oracle-specific SQL is "a particularly pernicious idea" (his words, not mine - see http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000WhO for more - look for "pernicious" 😊. He says that that kind of separation (not quite what you propose, but still something that would be handy for us ACS/pg types) slows you down in producing new sites, and that being able to swap new RDBMSs in and out isn't particularly useful.
That said, I'd love to see the kind of abstraction that you propose done. I confess to finding it a daunting prospect, unlike some folks here who seem to eat, drink, and breathe ACS (I'm working on it, I promise!). I also have some trouble seeing how we could manage to do it on our own and manage to keep up with ArsDigita's paid army of programmers. Of course, on the gripping hand, we do seem to be growing in numbers of downloads pretty quickly!
