Thank you both for answering.
My goal is to utilize the CR to define, generate, display, and validate object/attribute forms.
I'm using the CR docs as a guide for sequence of operations, and comparing CR and bcms APIs. I'm looking for a one-for-one correspondence between the two APIs, but they don't really match up. For example, where the CR docs show how to create a content type with content_type__create_type, I don't see a bcms API call to do the equivalent. But I do see correspondence in other areas.
Maybe this is the wrong approach? Is there a better approach? Possibly someone has already correlated the APIs and created a step-by-step that will show me at least a part of what I'm trying to do?
/R