You will probably hate me for saying but i think there is something do this in 3.5. At least i seem to remember something going in... Will take a look.
However, the hardest part about importing is matching to your object/class structure. Reading the data is very simple, and most of the examples you listed will do this.
Thanks for your reply. 3.5... on the one hand ¡damn!, on the other hand it sounds like there is some good new functionality coming up in 3.5.
Is there a release date for 3.5 as yet? Or is it possible to extract the import function as an extension ala the multioption?
If I knew for sured that 3.5 would be able to do this and it was going to be released in the not too distant future I could in theory carry on dev'ing the rest of the site and the data imprtation function toward the end of the build.
Normally you kind of want to get these fundamentals working early on in the build...