Using "progressive disclosure" for alias patterns

This is a thought I've played with a little while now, which I'll try to put down in words.

Current situation

Pathauto's admin page is currently way, way too cluttered, with a progressively increased cluttering as you add node types and languages and what not. Most of the time, only a few of these options are used, so the rest are just taking up space, thus making it hard to navigate through the long, long list.

Solution?

My idea is to have a dropdown of options (and possibly a second one for languages), which you can choose, and it would then be added to a list you could fill out. This would allow us to add a nearly limitless amount of further options to automatically create aliases for, while the admin page would still only be cluttered by the options actually in use.
E.g.:

Add pattern for [node|user|...] ([language]): [Add option]

[_] Node (default): [title]
[_] Node: Story (default): [yyyy]/[mm]/[dd]/[title]
[_] Node: Story (English): [yyyy]/[dd]/[mm]/[title]

[Edit selected options] [Delete selected patterns]

Future...

A structure like this might also make it possible to do some conditional checking; e.g. one option could have several patterns (pattern_1, pattern_2, pattern_N), and the first !empty() one would then be the one used. (This is inspired by #267441: if-then-else patterns and may be better handled otherwise, but the comment here was meant to put this entire proposal in perspective.)