New headlines module -- your feedback, please!

I've written a module, called headlines.module, which is designed to create newspaper-like "headlines pages" for Drupal websites. It lets admins organize content into "sections" (like the sections of a newspaper. Each section can include multiple "topics." (For example, a sports section might include topics such as baseball, football, tennis.) Topics are derived from taxonomy terms, with a couple of refinements. First, a "topic" encompasses a term and all of that term's child terms. Second, there are a couple of "special" topics called "top stories" and "miscellaneous" that don't correspond to any taxonomy terms. Within each topic, there can be multiple "items," each of which lists the headline and an optional brief summary description for a single Drupal node.

Headlines.module is designed to interoperate with a separate module that I've written, called abstract.module, which manages the brief summary descriptions for each item on a headlines page.

Before adding these module to Drupal contributions, I'd like to get as much feedback as possible. For the time being, therefore, they can be downloaded as tarbells from my website, at the following URLs:

http://www.prwatch.org/headlines.tar.gz
http://www.prwatch.org/abstract.tar.gz

I'd appreciate any comments. I would also like to get feedback specially about abstract.module. Its function is very similar to the existing excerpt.module. The difference is that excerpt.module uses the teaser field in the node table to store its content, while abstract.module maintains a separate table for this purpose, thus leaving teasers unchanged. I'd like to know whether people think it would be best to:

1. offer abstract.module as a separate module from excerpt.module;
2. revise excerpt.module to include the functionality (and the separate table) that comes with abstract.module; or
3. eliminate abstract.module entirely and incorporate its functionality directly into headlines.module.

Thoughts, anyone?