@alanmarazzi: Thanks for the kind comments and seeing good discussion early is heartening.
I only have a small thing to add, that I took some time this morning to clearly explain the points behind the tech.ml-base system on the readme.
There is more to those systems than serialization, it comes down to being able to represent various parts of the problem as data (and datasets) that you can visualize in the repl and some details around how models are represented generically.
Anyway, again, great thread!