inlines - doable in views or a sorely needed module?

I've seen many posts asking questions about this issue and I've yet to see an elegant solution.

The last website I helped deploy was a newspaper site built on Django (a CMS written in python). Django has a very well thought out process for including various types of conent inside the body of a story (or node body). In Django, there is a "add inline" field that allows a content creator/editor to select from all available content types (videos, photo galleries, audio files, whatever). When an inline type is selected, a window pops up which displays a search form for that particular content type. Once an incline is selected, the window closes, and the inline id is made availabe to the original story.

This allowed us to add a photo gallery to a relevant area of a story (without having to use any type of WYSWIG) but just moving the generated code (inlineID) to the desired part of the content area. I would love to be able to do this with Drupal and I'm wondering if anybody has cracked this egg. I see that there is a module in progress called inline but I'm not sure that it's going to be flexible enough for all cck types. Thoughts?