Programmatic setup? Programmatic admin calls?

This may be the wrong forum to post to. If so, please point me to the right one. 🙂

I’m trying to see if there are any existing programmatic interfaces for basically setting up a new blog.

Creating an empty MySQL database and going through the initial web interface for having it create the tables, the sample post, the sample page, etc. is working fine, but if possible, I’d like to do this in a programmatic fashion (well, ideally without invoking a web test framework like Selenium).

After the initial blog creation/table population happens, there’s a few settings (theme, enabling some options, etc) I’d also like to do programmatically (sp?) if possible.

The hack-y approach I’m doing now, which works but I know is fragile and unsupported, is having taken a mysqldump of a freshly manually setup database and then using that to create the database for a new blog (with appropriate string replacements). I’d much rather use a programmatic approach, especially if there’s one supported by the WordPress team. 🙂