Dan,
I couldn't agree with you more - as an SAP employee it is great to be part of a community of people collaborating so passionately around a topic like MII ! We're working to cultivate this with Fiori too: What is SAP Fiori
I'm glad the pointers from the various responses helped you with your document building exercise. One of the reasons I wanted to point you to the template examples was to see the additional value of having the document columns built in advance provided the addtional meta data and not just mirroring the BAPI response tables. I can appreciate the desire to build the dataset dynamically, but so often the column names are quite cryptic and will always be string values in the xml, and things like DAT and TIM when put together with proper datatype converstion makes for a real DateTime field in the resultset.
Best Regards,
Jeremy
SAP Rapid Innovation Group - RIG