Have an ability to define a link type

When creating child nodes, not always all childs are the same. One is the first-born, a few others are normal, and one requires special attention.

I would like to have an option to specify a link type when creating the child node (probably through a taxonomy vocabulary) and have the ability to search for children of special link. Defining ordinality per link type would be awesome (e.g. you can have only one first born).

For a real life example, I might have a product brand as parent, and distributors as childs. There are different distributor levels - official, gold, silver and bronze. There can only be one official, no limitation on the others. My ideal solution for this would be to define a taxonomy vocabulary called "relationship type" and have the following terms: official, gold, silver and bronze. When defining the parent child relationships, I want to specify that this link type should be taken from this taxonomy vocabulary, and defin ordinality per term.

Let me know how far-fetched this idea is, and if you think this is better implemented using another module (CCK + nodereference comes to mind, but it is not even close in terms of flexibility).

I am ok with developing the required extension to this module, just please show me the right direction so it will be accepted eventually in this module (or should I write it as an add-on module?).

Thanks!