I'm working on a proposal for a deployment tool development project and I was wondering if anyone had any experience with such a thing.  

We use Healthshare and implementations for new clients are tedius and lengthy.  Lots of ensemble service, registry value, lookup tables, namespaces and other things have to be created and configured. 

I would like to create a Zen or CSP page based deployment tool that can do all this with a few parameters and some custom code.

Has anyone done this?  What are some pitfalls you ran into?  Any unique ideas you included?  Other general thoughts?