Feeds for Dummies

I have played around a bit with FeedApi and Views and the tying glue for most modules seems to be creation of nodes and/or other DB tables. Then I read some of what you are doing with feeds and feel like standing up and shouting in support. I just wish that I knew PHP so that I could help. In any case, ...

Here are some suggestions, based on what I have seen within FeedApi and what I actually need to do.

(1) I need to do some data mining, where I go out and create nodes for all of the youtube videos that are owned by a specific channel. A person may have 200 videos but gdata gives me a max of 50 at a time. So I need to loop around and submit the same URL with just the start-index that changes, instead of current having to have a node for each URL variation. But Youtube is a good example of how URL's need to be constructed on the fly - given just the video ID.

(2) I need to offer YouTube Searches and ideally, I would send a REST request to YouTube and it would give me back an HML file, which would get mapped and somehow passed to Views WITHOUT creating any DB records (no nodes and no data tables). I can not believe that there is nothing out there in Drupal land that makes this possible out of box.

(3) Perhaps at minimum one should be able to use a Views output as input to feeds. This way I could construct REST submissions from nothing more than a single field that contains a YouTube chanll/user id.

Thanks and can't wait to see what you guys end up cooking up.

Regards,
Zdravko