Best way to implement new features for question

Issue Summary

I'm building a site which will have fairly heavy emphasis on the ability for (anonyomous) users to ask questions and have them answered by an expert before being published on the site.
question.module has given me a great start, but I want to make a few changes to the way it works, so I wanted to ask:
a.) If anybody had advice on the best way to do these?
b.) Was interested in helping implement them? I've got a little php experience so I might be capable of butchering question.module to so this, but it won't be pretty...
c.) Rather than creating my own bastardised version of question.module, what is the best way to introduce and make these changes available back to the drupal community? Do any other users want these changes introduced as a patch to question.module, or is it best to keep it simple (and effective) at what it does now, and set this up as a new module?

So here's the issues:

1.) I need the ability to assign taxonomy terms to questions in the queue, before (or whether) they get answered. Two main reasons for this:
- I can't answer every question asked on the site, but I still want to collect information about which topics are generating the most questions.
- I want the ability to assign questions in the queue to different experts to answer depending on the content, so tagging a question with the 'elephant' would make it show up in the elephant expert's queue of questions to answer. (Might also need the help of views module to create different question queues?)

The problem I see with the current workflow is that questions only get created as nodes when an administrator promotes them from the queue and answers them. To be able to assign taxonomy terms to questions in the queue I think I would need to create them as unpublished nodes, and then only publish them when (if) they get answered. This is a major change in the way question.module works and I'm not sure what issues this might cause.

2.) I want to collect additional fields at the point of asking the question, such as the age of the questioner, the topic of the question etc. (see previous taxonomy issue). I know I can extend the question content type using cck, but this doesn't add the extra fields to be collected to the /question form. Maybe there could be a setting at admin/settings/question which allowed you to specify all the fields to capture?

3.) Finally, when the user submits their question to the queue they currently get the message: 'Your question was submitted.' or be redirected to another node. What I'd like to do is change this message so that it suggests possible links on the site which might be relevant to the question. I imagine this working by scanning through $content for occurrences of any terms in the vocabulary, and then generating a list of links to those vocabulary terms. Does anybody know any modules which currently implement this sort of functionality?

Any information or advice gratefully received!

t.