I would love to be able to have custom fields in the Documents module.

I want to be able to list an author for each document. Some would have multiple authors.

I know I can use the Created By field to search from our users, but we have a HUGE user database so it's very, very slow. (Only a very few of those users would ever be document authors.)

Additional fields would be nice too. Also DNN taxonomy/folksonomy support!

The Documents module isn't one of my favorites.

As alternatives, you might consider Ventrian's News Articles module, dignuke's digArticle module (supports taxonomy), and bring2mind.net's DMX modules.

The "articles" modules make a good substitute as you can attach the file(s) to an article, have access to summaries, descriptions, etc. Also categories, tagging, etc.

The DMX module is in a class by itself, and designed for document organization and publishing.

Great idea