Scripting charts in illustrator

I work in the graphics department at the Financial Times. As you might imagine we generate a large amount of basic charts. We have a custome written javascript plugin called Ilex that takes an excel spreadsheet and given variables such as single column line or bar chart will spit out an illustrator file drawn and sized to our house style. Its a fantastic little program that does the job quickly and saves us hours.

However as Excel have changed their file formats and some other OS updatea mean that we can't upgrade to the new excel and Mac OS without having large bits of Ilex re-written. As you can now use javascript diectly in illustrator it would be much more efficient if we could use this ability rather than something spanning two programs. I'm just looking into this and it immediatly throw up some questions.

1. How accesable is the charting engine to scripting in illustrator?

2. The illustrator charting engine is pretty basic, especially in this age of information design. Is it due for an overhaul? If so does anyone know if this is going to happen any time soon as I don't want to embark on a project that becomes redundant the day I get it up and running.

3. Can you access the basic chart colours and change them. By this I mean when you create say a bar chart the bars are black by default. Can i make it so they are a specific colour by default and not have to change them after the bar has been drawn. Similar with line colours and line weights, pies etc

4. Can Illustrator deal with log scale? quite an important one this.

I know it a bit of a nich discussion, but I'd appreciate any imput, especially from Adobe. Happy to work with them on overhauling the graphing engine.

Thanks

Bob