Recently, I had a client that did not wish to use the Page Editing controls provided by Sitecore.  They were only interested in the Content Editor.  This greatly simplified our data access needs.  We were able to grab field data and not worry about field names, etc…

Once field render controls were not needed, our CMS access scenarios were VERY simple and VERY repetitive (for example, getting the value of text field X).  To meet this need, we created a set of simple extension methods.