For all the unscheduled ideas, is that due to lack of user demand?
The 'live contact sheet' idea is similar to a smart album in Aperture, or a smart playlist in iTunes. First of all you create a search, but this would not be a full search of the whole computer (incidentally, whenever I do searches with PM I never see all the images that I know I have). Instead you can restrict the search to a particular folder. The search can be by any variable, but for this example it would use the byline variable. Each search would of course be a tabbed windowed contact sheet.
Whenever I add/ingest more images into the folder which I have pointed the search to, any matching images will automatically appear in the live search contact sheets.
So I can have my main contact sheet showing all images, then several tabbed windows each showing images from a particular photographer. Each window will contain the latest images based on the search.
Not sure I'm explaining it properly. What do you think?