Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by 'hard-code'. Right now, I have hard-coded nothing except the deserialization code in things like FileHeaderBlock (decode() method). If this is what you refer to, then yes, I believe that we could do better - I was thinking that we could implement our own serialization class that could encode/decode data points in some sort of regular pattern, and apply the rules to each of the block types. Then it would just be a matter of laying out the class structure appropriately.

I am curious, though, what coding abilities do you have (and could you help out)?

If you've worked with some of the other developers, maybe you could answer some of my questions... like, why do I have to swap bytes so often?

I'd love to get my hands on as much source code from any of the other projects as possible. Although, from what I gather, I'm the first to post source code? which seems crazy...