Unifying D6 Asset Management and Looking Forward to D7

I am immensely interested in getting a rock-solid asset management system in place for Drupal 6, and my company is willing to pay for the work involved (my time spent). The purpose of this discussion is to 1) make sure that my assessment of the situation is accurate / common and 2) to make sure that whatever I come up with will be relatively forward-compatible with D7.

Really what our business needs is a unified structure that we can reasonably extend and does a good job of organization / management, and other modules can reasonably build upon instead of re-invent (think CCK or Views for asset management). Some particulars:

• Available as a CCK field, most similar to http://drupal.org/project/imceimage
• Allows you to browse existing files instead of uploading again
• Supports meta-data like image titles and descriptions
• Integrates well with node-based features like Views or Blocks
• Sensible integration with ImageCache for thumbnails
• Plays nicely with the Wysiwyg module version of TinyMCE
• Can support arbitrary data sources, like Flickr, and treat those images the same way as a local file.
• Attach PDF, YouTube videos, etc. rather than only managing images.
• Easily usable as a data source for Galleria ( http://drupal.org/project/galleria ), which currently uses the core upload / attachment functionality

The file management "killer features" list at http://drupal.org/node/325299 also gives some idea of what I'm talking about.

In a lot of ways, our goals are similar to projects like Asset ( http://drupal.org/project/asset ), which unfortunately does not have a stable D6 version available. The best we've been able to do using fairly stable existing modules is to use the IMCE CCK image field for structured data and the IMCE TinyMCE / WYSIWYG plugin for inline images, but this really only covers a few of our needs. Adding in more modules like Image, etc. only further complicates the administration of the files. Overall the biggest difficulty has been getting an image asset solution to integrate well with a RTE module.

I have a good idea of what the underlying table / node / module structures would look like in D6, but not really any idea of where the D7 approaches are going. Does it even make sense to create this module for Drupal 6 first? Would it be any better to just port it back to D6 later? Moving to D7 for our sites any time soon is not a possibility.

Rather than make a new project, would it make sense to try and push Asset forward?

edit: Some additional links -

http://groups.drupal.org/node/18063 (Media Sprint 2009) and http://drupal.org/project/media (Media project) are also similar to what I am thinking, but appear to have a more D7-centric approach in mind.