Well, it seems most people kept on topic, which means there were plenty of ideas and thoughts mentioned.  Yay!

My thought was for some manner of importing and exporting members that could be used to be an intermediary between two programs or repositories of information.  RSS is a nice little example of this, actually.  It takes the data ExpressionEngine has and puts it in a form that can be recognized by Wordpress (for importing), Magpie (for displaying), and various program (for reading).

So, what is to stop any developer from creating a nice little format for importing and exporting member information in the same way?  Figure out a nice little XML/tab-delimitted/etc. format and then create a module to export and import using this format.  To import phpBB members, one would simply need to get its member information in this format and use the import feature in the module.  To import a spreadsheet of old members into a new site, you would simply need to get that information into the format so that your module could import it. 

On the reverse side, you can export the member information so that it can be used by other organizations or divisions of a company easily.  If the standard was accepted by another community, perhaps they could even build their own importer/exporter for this data format.  Thus, you could move members from one to the other if you had the importer for one and the exporter for another.

What I am thinking of is on the lines of the MT Export format but only for member data.  Surely you admit this would be useful?  And think, if someone designs this module and format, it could be shared with other developers.