[eluser]brandingdavid[/eluser]
To answer your other questions:
I want to provide all the data in one fell swoop. Like a category listing you see on the sides of blogs running WP.
I want to be able to move objects in a certain order. If I want Featured to show up, I'll set it to be 0 or 1 for menu_index, and I'll write code to refactor everything else, then doing the db queries, I was going to sort asc.