Quote - Sounds like it would be a cool project. I'll try to help, time and energy permitting.
I'd love to learn more about interface design.

Seriously though, considering how big of a chunk this is to chew through... why not develop a blender add on?  I don't mean, why not, as in you shoud... but what are the pros and cons of that direction? 

Blender has an interface that can be best described as mildly evil (not fully evil like its predecessors, but evil nonetheless).

The UI is actually not that tough to write anymore, at least like it was in the days that Kai Krause was carving his all out of raw code, and all you had were 256 colors to pick from. Each OS nowadays has its own internals (.NET, Cocoa, about a zillion for Linux to pick from, etc), and there are a lot of very nice cross-platform ones (put in pimp-shout for Qt here).

If I wasn't already promised up to my eyeballs with R'otica (and currently migrating the entire store), I'd kill to get a piece of what's being proposed here. Either way, I'll keep as good an eye on it as I can in the interim...

/P