@ Mitch
Custom fields are definitely still on the roadmap. Time frame is hard to pin down but 0.7.9 finally has me to the point in all the code restructuring where things like this are relatively easily added.
@ Mike
With the release of 0.7.9, this should be somewhat easy for your freelancers to do. actually they should do it with very little editing to the Connections core at all and if they are very clever in the implementation I belie it could be pulled off by creating and extension plugin for Connections. Matter of fact, that is exactly how I’m going to do it. Changes to the core to make this more efficient would is to add hooks so plugins can manipulate the core query to include metadata and a few other things that’ll be part of the version .8