This sounds promising! I've occasionally looked at DXO, but they don't have the camera/lens combos I have, so making my own profiles would be a killer feature.
I think one of the key things for this is to have seamless, easy and quick way to integrate into an existing workflow. DNG sounds like a good start, but batch processing based on EXIF data would take it a step further. Not sure how many of the features can be applied automatically, and how many need manual tweaking for each image, though.
The design is based heavily on reading the EXIF data to automate adjustment parameters. The most important EXIF data are camera make/model/serial, lens make/model/serial, focal length, and aperture. The data needed to really correct lens blur properly is far too complex to adjust manually
I'm sampling 32-64 points from center to edge of image circle. Each data point has an array of values representing blur amount in various directions and various distances from the sample point, as well as distortion and vignette correction parameters. There are separate arrays for each color channel. The user interface for manually tweaking the data would literally be a screen filled with text boxes or sliders with no room for labels or captions to explain what they all did. The only manual interaction with the program will be to specify which DNG files are to be processed, output folder, filling in data not in EXIF (if you use a lens that doesn't communicate electronically with body), and rise/fall/shift data when using a lens with shift capability.
Why restricting you're self to a adobe only format, this seems rather silly to me.
DNG is an open file format; the specifications for creating and reading DNG files is freely available, and I can create an application that reads & writes DNG without having to pay license fees to anyone. DNG has already been adopted by several camera manufacturers as their RAW format, and DNGs can be read by many non-adobe programs. Like it or not, it is the closest thing to a universal open RAW format out there.
Jonathan then could make it possible to have several formats or even a sort of plugin architecture.
I'm keeping the guts of the program separate from the user interface, to make it easier to integrate into a plugin or whatever for a RAW converter or image editor. I'm going to get the standalone version working first before trying to make plugin versions though.
I know you already have quite a few features to implement, but I'll propose lens/lighting calibration feature using common color targets.
All of the corrections I'm doing take place in the camera's native space, so if you're using custom DNG camera profiles they will work exactly the same whether the file has been run through my program or not, unless your camera lens combination has significant vignetting or lens cast issues (different color balance in the center of image circle vs edge). In that case, you'll want to run your profiling target image through my program before feeding it to Passport or whatever.
The target for profiling the lens corrections will be completely different than a target used for color profiling; it will be an array of regularly-spaced small white dots on a black background. I'm still working on the design.