MagneticOne's Store Manager (a commercial offering) provides a local interface for the ZC database and facilitates the management of the database on a local machine outside of the ZC admin interface. There are some advantages to this, as one can manage product data en-masse using spreadsheets. Some argue that this interface is better than Easy Populate.

While it has nothing to do with FM, the techniques used by MagneticOne may provide a direction you could follow in your efforts to bridge Fm with ZC.