I agree with your basic approach to making IB more attractive.

I have often wanted to work on your item #1 (creating a library of UDF's
which provide similar functions to Oracle functions). One big impediment is
that a UDF cannot now tell if a field whose value is being passed into the
function is NULL. Nor can a UDF return a NULL state as a result. I would
like to see this changed so that both are provided in a future version of
IB. Perhaps a new parameter passing convention similar to VMS descriptors?