I'm nearing the release of an app that will show some extra member variables in topics/messages/etc and I'm beginning to look at what will need to go into showing this data in the userinfopane. I noticed that all the data is coming from that 'members' join in topics.php, so I suppose I would need to edit that to include the new fields (since it would be impossible to use an action overloader to do it, unless I wanted to overwrite the entire thing), so I figured I'd ask... any chance that in a future version that join can simply use a wildard(*) instead of specific fields? I'm sure this won't be the last app to need to access custom fields in this deparment, and what with all the focus on hooks now and minimizing file edits, I figured this is a logical step.
Next step is to a solution to the missing link between template hook data and the template data it's hooking into... but I'll leave that for the already started threads about that issue. :)