Good dialog, guys.  If you look around the forum, you will see that this debate has come up more than once and we have mentioned that there will be most of what you are requesting in future updates.  The goal is to get away from data queries...this would be slow and unresponsive the large the app became.  But we have some ideas that we feel will be beneficial to everyone and still make it easy to make changes.  This will not be implemented until SF 2.0, however, when we rewrite all UI controls.

SF 2.0?? Cool. When?

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_____/ Regards,
____/ al

It will be late in the year before we release a totally new SF 2.0.  We want to make sure that there isa  migration path and there is a LOT of new stuff that we want to do including more RAD and web components, etc.