modproxy load balancer

Ping to all list citizens (listizens?) ...
Who would be interested in seeing some load balancing function being put 
into mod_proxy?  Anyone given any though on what you would like to see 
or maybe even have a design proposal you'd like to discuss?

My short requirements list:
- selectable load balancing algorithm: Round robin, LRU,  response time, 
url driven, session affinity, ?
- automatic detection of backend server failure and removal of the 
failed server from the load balancing routing tables (forever? for a 
period of time? other?)
- connection pooling using HTTP keep-alive (this is a no brainer since 
it is a simple extension of what browsers already do, but it needs to be 
designed in from the start)
- must be effective with multiple child processes, each child must make 
routing decisions globally based on stats maintained in a shared memory 
segment

To do this properly, I would think we need some new config directives. 
Perhaps a new container directive to define a group of backend servers,  
another container directive to define URLs served by a particular group 
of backend servers. Need some way to bind a url group to a server group.

Bill