Courses and course formats

One of the great things about Moodle is the number of methods of providing information and activities to students.  We've had teachers use all 3 formats, because they all offer something the others don't.  For example, the social format doesn't allow for easily-accessible activities like the topics format, but that has limitations by showing discussions "off the main page" where not many students think to check regularly.   Wouldn't it be great if we could combine all formats into another, significantly more configurable format?  In fact you would combine more than the 3 formats we have now.  Here's what I had in mind:

The format would generally behave as the topics format does now, however, each "topic" would allow you to define an activity that would actually run within the topic box.  So you could have, say, an introductory topic with a few activity links (quizzes, resources, etc), but the next topic would be a minature version of the discussion format.  Eventually we could have some of the current activities able to be shown in "topic format", having ongoing wikis, workshops, lessons, forums, etc, all on the front page. 

I imagine alongside "Add a resource" and "Add an activity" we could have "Define topic activity" or similar, and we could then choose to display the topic as an instance of a discussion, wiki, etc. 

This is obviously a lot of work, but i'm sure it can be done.  Rather than opening up some of the activities in their own page, they would be displayed on the front page with the same interactivity.

Thoughts?