For 1, are you suggesting something like a GUI for a list of data transformation recipes? I.e. specify an input format and an output format and press play? How would these recipes be created?
I'm not sure how the GUI for creating recipes would work. It would probably need to be pretty complex.
I have an idea in my mind where you arange premade blocks on a canvas and connect them with pipes (a patch based UI like Quartz Composer), but I doubt that this would really be the best way to do it.
There's also tasks that are one-off (eg. migrate data from one system to another) and things that need to happen regularly or even continuously.