Built in url rewrite structure - a la pathauto/views

I've been using path-auto to alias taxonomy urls to mysite.com/tags/[taxonomy-term] - and views/cck arguments to get content-type specific displays like mysite.com/news/[taxonomy-term].
I've realised though that the views structure leads to only one page of settings to deal with, whereas path-auto requires 4000 url aliases for 2000 terms (since I alias feed as well), and thought there might be an easier way to do this.

I was wondering whether taxonomy module (or maybe a lightweight views in core), would allow for customisable taxonomy term url structures along the mysite.com/something/[term-name] lines to save all those url aliases?

This might also cause problems with the 1+2+3 and 1,2,3 url constructions. I have no idea if it'd be possible to do that with term names as arguments though..