So, something I was thinking of working toward eventually was switching Astropy over to using d2to1 or something like it.  As I wrote in that e-mail this morning d2to1 still needs some love and care before it can really take on the task.  But once it's ready to, part of its functionality is to describe all the project's metadata in its setup.cfg, just like this.  Most of the stuff we implement currently in setup.py would become setup hooks, all of which would have direct access to this metadata as a dict.