What I don't understand is why Toady can't just give that information to us. I know he doesn't want to coordinate with 3rd party stuff, but if he'd merely bother with simply providing us the core.xml information...
maybe simply because he doesn't know?
If I write a class with an attribute, I don't see why I should care what is the offset of the attribute from the base address of an object of the class. I would guess that the memory hackers could know more about the actual memory organization than Toady himself. After all, he writes the code, so he doesn't have to "hack".
as for utilities sharing basic info, maybe a simple improvement will be that tool makers all try to use the same config file format, so that 1 config file serves all. In addition, tools that use auto-detection or memory pattern searching in the absence of a config file should not use the info direct in their tool. they should make the tool output the info into a config file (create a new one), and the subsequently uses the config file itself as if the config file was there from the beginning.... so that a working config file generated by one tool can potentially be used for others. also, a config file should be able to record data from different DF versions simultaneously, so that running different DF version will not erase data from other DF versions already set up. In the future, we could even have utils whose only purpose is to analyze a new DF exe and generate config files for other utils to use.
Just a simple suggestion, which could take less effort to coordinate but could provide greater benefits in the long run.