Wrestling with the content manager

For the most part I think XNA is brilliantly designed. The Content Manager though... meh.

To add a new type of content to a project you need to create a whole slew of classes across multiple projects with specific compiler instructions and links to each other. The whole thing is also very debug resistant - it's hard to put breakpoints in a content processor because it is run during compile time instead of runtime.

I mean I guess it's not super hard, and the documentation is nice, but it's still a chore. Difficult to wrap my head around. I've avoided digging into the content manager so far (even at work), but I'd like to do this right.

The goal is to have a system where artists can just send me images with some extra information and the content manager automatically parses them into a spritesheet to use in the game.

like this

I can already do that, but it happens during the game itself (so the player is treated to a loading bar). With the content manager I could do it in advance and load the spritesheets directly into the game.