Format from the HD menu

Can I suggest the Format menu option for HD’s set an environment variable for the drive in question and then run an external program via an Obey file? eg System:!FormatSCSI, System:!FormatSD, System:!FormatADFS

These can run stripped down HForm’s, which have a GUI on them and don’t ask all the stupid questions it currently does. It just needs a confirmation box showing the drive to be formatted, an OK and CANCEL button.

The advantage of this method is it involves relatively little effort to get user friendly GUI’s done for formatting drives from the filers.

HForm’s, which have a GUI on them

I think the Filing system improvements (step 2) bounty covers that.
One would hope that any such GUI would display all available partitions to make things easy and come with an option to peek into each to check what is there before you trample all over it

Excellent idea.