A delayed parenting system would be neat.
A few of the game engines I have worked on they have a feature called "boids" or "flocking".http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids
It would be extremely useful for fish or birds (I think boid is a joke name for how some Americans pronounce birds).
It is also useful for moving large numbers of objects like groups of infantry for a Real time strategy game (RTS) or moving a bunch of mobs in a tower defense game with dynamic paths and dynamic objectives.
One of the engines has a promotion system to choose the alpha boid ,(the one that all the others will seem to follow). After the alpha gets destroyed, it would choose the next boid to take over the overall flock's path.
If it is not too much trouble can we have something like this too?