Just a thought, not necessarily on making modding easier, but making FREDding easier. Obviously adapting the existing FRED for this purpose would be quite difficult, but with the possibility of wxFRED, perhaps it could be done. I know that advanced FREDders have developed some techniques to get the game to perform some interesting functions. These functions may require some event arrangements that except for mission-specific data such as ship names, times, waypoints, etc. are always the same. Perhaps wxFRED could be pre-loaded with something like event subroutines. Someone needing said functions for their mission, would have an option within the right-click menu to call on these pre-made event templates, just like there is an option for different conditionals. All they have to do is plug their own data into the default fields and suddenly a sequence it might take an experienced FREDder 20 min to set up, and a learning FREDder 2h to figure out how to assemble, can be done a like 2min.
Perhaps there could be a way to customize these. Lets say that you use a specific type of event frequently in your missions, but it takes a while to set up. You could create your own template, save it, name it, and call on it whenever you need it.
I know you could simply create a mission with your own templates in it, save it, and call it up whenever you want to create a mission with these functions in it, but this way you can combine as many or as few functions as you want without having to delete what you don't want to keep. HLP could even keep an online repository of commonly used event templates, as decided by popular vote, and accept submissions for further event templates for later inclusion.