Author Attributes–outside the loop

I’m wondering if anyone has written a plugin/hack that allows loopless access to author attributes like the description, email, etc. If there hasn’t been one, I’d write one if there’s interest. I think that rather than having to make performance-taxing calls to the loop for every individual author, a straight-up access to the users table would make more sense in several cases.

I’ve been expecting get_author_[attribute] functions to be added into the code base for several releases, but it just isn’t happening.

Let me know!
Brad Kovach
https://www.bradkovach.com