Advanced frontpage node adminstration module - a proposal

We at Aller Media in Norway are implementing Drupal7 on some of our high traffic sites and we have the need for an advanced frontpage node administration module.

We have this functionality in our legacy CMS we developed in-house, and we plan to port this functionality to Drupal. I have researched quite a bit on this topic and have not found such existing functionality in Drupal. Although it could be hacked together with existing modules like Nodequeue/Draggable views, Scheduler, Views, Blocks and the Dashboard, it still does not satisfy the requirements.

Here is our requirement:

We have a custom workbench workflow where nodes go from Draft -> Desk -> Ready -> Published. A journalist creates an article in "Draft" and sends it to "Desk" for approval. An editor takes over and then approves it to the "Ready" status. We then have a senior editor who decides which articles are published into which positions on the front page as not all articles always get published to the first top position on the front page.

So what we need is a dashboard for the senior editor that can list 2 different views. On the right side, we have something like nodequeue listing out the published nodes currently being displayed on the frontpage of the site. This has a drag-n-drop interface to order the nodes as desired. On the left side we have a view displaying nodes that are in the "Ready" status.

The editor can then drag a node from the Ready queue over to the Published queue into any position. When saved, the node is published and it appears in that position it was placed into.

The nodes listed in the "Ready" view should also have a functionality to set a "publish date" for the node. So the editor can choose a future time/date for the node to publish right from this interface.

The published view should also have the possibility to lock a certain node into a certain position. This way when new nodes are brought into the queue, the locked node stays put while others move downwards.

The published view will also display real-time statistics data for each node. This gives the editor a birds eye view of how well each node is doing on the frontpage and so they can drag popular nodes higher up in the queue if they so desire to promote it.

If possible in the future we would also like to add a "timeline" feature where editors can order the nodes for their frontpage at different points of time in the future. For example to setup what they want their frontpage to look like at 9am tomorrow and another setup for 12pm tomorrow and so on. A timeline slide bar could then be used to view all the setups at each point of time set in future. This feature is not desired at the moment, but could be added later if desired.

I have attached an illustration below. I can add a demo video of our existing system if required.