Before I forget to post about it, I wanted to write about importing and exporting data using drupal, the Feed API, Views Data Source and the RDF Project (which I still need to investigate).
For simplicity sake, and the sanity of myself and my clients I have decided to start developing all new drupal client sites with the Simple Menu module. Simple Menu takes the default authenticated user navigation (typically on the left block) and places it along the top of the page - works great with any theme and looks really clean and slick.