progress update:
Spent a lot of time fidgeting with the UI xml, but ended up ditching it and creating the controls all in lua.
The player frame is constructed. Need to wire it all up now.
Once the player frame is functional it should be relatively easy to extend to the target, group, and raid frames.
Ohh and naming is still open to considerations. A guildmate suggested qqFrames (and that I reply with "foff" to all bug reports, but I wouldn't do that to you guys
).