We could simply add all kinds of switches and coding to help this process,
but in the end we end up with an over complicated format that grows into a monster!

and

I as an old school type and database person would think it far better, to take
a more pratical approach.

Most probably I’m not qualified to seriously discuss Bibliography matters in ConTeXt, but wat Keith has written here appeals to me.

It would probably be OK to try and control all and everything in a Bibliography with commands and codes if there were only a few standard ways of presenting a bibliography.

But that is not the case, even if most people seem to use apa-style.

What should one do with an old book, of which there are several “facsimile editions” and an English translation, and you were required, by the publisher or the university, to render it in the Bibliography in the following way:

Gasparini, Francesco, L’Armonico pratico al cimbalo (Venice, 1709); repr. (New York, 1967); repr. (Bologna, 2001); trans. Frank Stillings as The Practical Harmonist at the Harpsichord (New Haven, CT, 1963)

or, other example:

Buchner, Hans, Das Fundamentbuch (c1525), CH-Bmi, MS F.I.8; ME: in Carl Paesler, ‘Fundamentbuch von Hans von Constanz, Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Orgelspiels im 16. Jahrhundert’, VMw, 5 (1889), 1-192

?

With a Bibliography to make of about 500 items, for a PhD thesis, of which more than half were of this kind, I gave up on all sophisticated tools of BibTeX and exclusively used the format Booklet, with Author, Title, City and PubYear, generated a .bbl and edited that to give me  the correct form.