Yes, that's the point I made when .LRN was first being written, a point Ben agreed with but had insufficient resources to tackle given how far behind schedule they were etc.
Jade, adding a service contract to get display information for an object type would duplicate the template association facility that already exists in the CR and that we want to extend to regular objects. We don't really want to duplicate such functionality but rather want to 1) publicize the fact it already exists and 2) extend it to regular objects.