It's not necessarily a replacement for the CMS package. Those who are working with it have plans to make it more comprehensive, so maybe it can grow to be a replacement package. It's certainly a very useful package.
Reworking the CMS package's UI would be a major undertaking and currently no one seems to like it well enough to take it on.
Back to workflow ... you don't really want to invent separate workflows tied down the individual ETP applications. Instead, you want to define some workflows that implement various publishing paradigms that can then be applied to the underlying CR objects by any of the applications.
In other words workflows should be thought of as being more generalized and not tied down to a particular application.
One thing I've been considering personally is to put together some workflows for CR objects, and some Tcl API support for that, that any package using the CR could use. Not for this release cycle, obviously.
This would allow any CR-based package to make use of one (or more) of the common workflow paradigms. For instance, I'd love to have one that implements the old "open/closed/wait" style of content submission/approval. The idea is that you could attach whichever workflow's appropriate for your environment and/or package. If you need a more complex submission/edit/approval process than the old 3x style mentioned above, you'd just make your package use that workflow.
