Hello, @nullhawk , welcome to MusicBrainz, and thank you for your interest in contributing to MusicBrainz through GSoC.
My name is Jim, and I am an ordinary contributor, not a MusicBrainz or GSoC authority. So my comments are just those of an interested user.
I can see the value of a configuration wizard for Picard. One aspect of the design which I don’t see much in your first writeup is “personas”. What kind of user will this work benefit? A persona describes that user, what they have, what they want, what they do now, and what obstacles they encounter. The idea of making clear personas is that they help you make wise choices during design and implementation: you can just ask yourself, “What would the Mary Music-Collector persona want?” So, perhaps consider including descriptions of personas in the design.
The persona that would benefit from this is someone with a lot of digital music files, a desire to get them better organised and tagged, and not much awareness of MusicBrainz. The persona might be similar to the you of years past. I, on the other hand, am a different persona. I have used Picard for a long time. I take advantage of its plugins and detailed settings. I often make edits to MusicBrainz metadata to control what Picard ends up writing to my music files. I have finished configuring Picard, and don’t need a wizard anymore.
An interesting goal for the configuration wizard might be to suggest to the user that they consider contributing metadata to MusicBrainz. Maybe there will be a point in the workflow where the user discovers that the album they want to tag is not in MusicBrainz, or it is in MusicBrainz but some details are wrong. The configuration wizard won’t edit MusicBrainz for them, but it might lead them to create a MusicBrainz user ID, and start to learn about MusicBrainz editing.
A different but related project is one which would really help me: make Picard able to write its metadata to a local file, and able to read metadata from a local file instead of from MusicBrainz. I would use this for unpublished albums which I want to tag and play in my music collection, but don’t want to add to MusicBrainz. For example, when my chorus makes an archival recording of a performance which, for business reasons, we are not allowed to distribute. Or, a rip of the audio from an opera DVD, where I break the audio into more helpful “tracks” than the original DVD used. A possible format for the local data might be the XML data file which MusicBrainz can deliver via a Release’s “Details” tab. Maybe this could be an extra “stretch” goal.
I hope these ideas are encouraging and helpful for you. Again, I am just another MusicBrainz contributor. If these ideas conflict with what you and MusicBrainz need for a successful GSoC, feel free to disregard them. Best of luck!