w.r.t. my experience with defcon and ufoLib. Some of the functionality I discuss (notifications, etc.) definitely shouldn't go into fontTools however we ought to make fontTools.ufoLib "compatible" with these extra features. I'm sure we can do simple and versatile.
IMO fontTools.ufoLib should basically be written from scratch (with copy-pasting here and there) since ufoLib/defcon have significant bloat and apparently we want to use lxml.