Accessing information from the subform element

I love the concept of the subform element, and it seems perfect for my application, but I'm having some trouble understanding the form processing flow.

I'm creating a moderation workflow, so I want to have a form that has a number of elements related to a cck node, but I don't want to store that info in the node. For instance, I am allowing a moderator to set a workflow state, select a standard email to the author, enter notes if held for further review, etc., but I didn't want to store all that stuff in the node itself.

I added a CCK node subform to a module form, and both parts work fine, i.e. the subform saves, and my other info is passed to the module_form_validate and module_form_submit functions. But I can't see any of the node form elements in the those functions, so I can't react to changed that were made in the node subform.

Am I missing something here, or does the subform element remove all of that information by design? I expected the subform values to be a nested element in the $form_values that got passed to the module.