Hi, Zig - good questions, all!
1) Currently, no, there is no better way. There should be and one day there probably will be. Perhaps a "teacher-only" section/block with the usual controls to add activities would do the trick.
2) It's a good hack, given what you have in Moodle to work with in this regard. In future, I believe this would be the functionality of a mod/resource/program.php script that would use the security passed out to it. http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=1547 But instead of using offline assignments it would use:
3) Manual gradebook columns. The gradebook needs to expanded to support arbitrary columns not connected with activities. These could be filled manually or by a program resource. The other new column type would be calculated columns, for which simple math functions can be entered to generate data from the other columns.
Basically, the kludges you've done sound the best available until this other stuff is developed.
Mathematics tools
Questions related to WeBWorK module development
This discussion has been locked so you can no longer reply to it.