Yep. In the land of Sideview Utils this is called "Patterns", and there has been some tinkering to implement this as a module called "Pattern". You would specify a pattern name and a couple arguments to that pattern, the pattern definition would be in your app somewhere, and ultimately the whole giant block of reusable form-element config or what-have-you would be reduced to a few lines.
There are a lot of technical hurdles in the way of doing it as a module, and it may end up coming into the world slightly differently - with Sideview Utils packaging it's own entirely standalone view controller, such that the URL in your browser as you moved from view to view would actually be
/en-US/custom/sideview_utils/views/your_dashboard_name_here
Yes if there were reusable patterns this would remove a huge amount of pain and frustration from splunk view development. That said, the off-the-shelf patterns that you would get out of the box would not be the big deal - rather it's the fact that all splunk deployments have some little block of shared Pulldown + TextField + TimeRangePicker + Button that they have to use over and over again.... Or some nutty looking SingleValue pattern with gauge stuff in it. Every deployment has its own little patterns it would want to define.
Anyway, the ability to have some extensible macro layer to just roll up complex view config into a "pattern" will be great.
And then from there, I could easily make the Sideview Editor operate at the Pattern layer as well as the raw-Module layer. So you can "add new pattern" and in the schematic view of the Editor, you'll just see a couple patterns linked together instead of a huge tree of modules.
It is true that the Simple XML has been getting incremental improvements. For instance as sowings says, doing simple custom drilldowns from charts and tables can now basically be done in the simple xml. However there's plenty more in the long tail of dashboard requirements that still sends people across the chasm into the advanced XML and SVU.
