Well if you are taking a break, perhaps you may enjoy some reading.
The race I was working on was a race of parasitic wasps that would primarily gain population by capturing animals and invaders and feeding them to larva. Most of the communication of the team was done via forum thread so you can actually read the whole development process.
The first one you want to read is this one right here:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=141987.0Basically, this is the thread where the idea is first suggested. Me and a few others decide to help out by contributing a few files and then there is a sort of radio silence as I continue working on my creature file, the thread creator Insanegame27 assumes the thread is dead.
By the time I finished my work, Insane has created a
new thread with a new guy helping out, Than402. After a brief moment where I reappear and merge my creature file with Than's, we become less of like a bunch of one-time contributors and more of a stable development team. We make steady progress on the mod and if you are only going to read one thread, read this one!
Eventually,
another thread is made in order to commemorate the beta release of the mod. Personally I thought this was too early (lot's of bugs, the core mechanic of capturing enemies was barely functional, no graphics, many missing features) but I didn't say anything because I didn't have the courage to speak up. At most you could call it an alpha, but even that is stretching it.
Soon afterwards development died. For me, this was mainly due to school and the difficulty of drawing sprites, but also realizing the shear magnitude of work still needed to be done to make it a complete and polished product.
So what does this have to do with Xenos? Well xenomorphs reproduce via eggs, then facehuggers, the host infection, then chestburster, then full-blown xenomorph. Hivemind wasps reproduce via egg, then larva, the host infection, then full-blown wasp. They are surprisingly similar. Many of the problems we encountered in development will likely be the same ones you will encounter. You can look at our threads for inspiration if you want.
Also, you will have to use Dfhack scripts to make it work. If I understand correctly, you already know how to use Dfhack so it shouldn't be as big of a problem as it was for us, but I'm just warning you that "delving much deeper into raw editing" is not going to be the only thing you need to do to accomplish this.
Still, despite all of my warnings, I see you as a very capable modder who I honestly believe has a much better chance at accomplishing a project like this than we did. Hopefully what I said so far will be helpful and I wish you good luck.