@bagginsbill: your plan for separating the GUI from the program core sounds excellent. I like to loosely-couple the heck out of things wherever I get the chance.

(Little anecdote: one of my projects at work is developing and maintaining an online meta-data browser for a research group who specializes in volume data analysis. For some reason, everyone assumes that the automatic import and slice image generation functionality is implemented as part of the web server's code base, written in Ruby on Rails. Why the heck would I do that? For one, Ruby doesn't have anything even remotely equivalent to numpy and PIL, so for someone like me, who doesn't particularly like writing huge chunks of C/C++ code, Python was the natural choice. Also, it's much easier to add new kinds of data if the preprocessing is done separately and the results sent to server via HTTP, using a human-readable specification format. Finally, I don't have to worry about how the web server will get access to the actual data repository, and how to handle permissions and all that jazz.)

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.