Actually i had considered something like this before castaway did her patches. I wanted to intorduce the concept of a deferred table. Basically every node on pm has a nodetype (which is itself a node). Nodetype nodes store the tables used to create a given node. So if the tablelist is 'node,document,user' when a node of that type is fetched or inserted it will insert a record into each of those tables (joining on ${table1}_id==${table2}_id). What i wanted to do was have a special marker (i was thinking '!') that would flag that the table is deferred. The table would NOT be fetched unless specifically requested, but it would be inserted/deleted or updated if the object was new or the required fields were present.

I still think this is probably a useful idea, but its low priority as its a pretty intrusive change. Also with the design that castaway took we can support multiple pads for a user.