xrefs and revisions management

In the past, our projects have been small enough, and our team has
been close-knit enough to cope, but we're now finally thinking that
it's time we got a bit smart about how we document changes in
drawings, and how we manage the initiation of drawings and their
subsequent drawing issues.

I've seen, and been impressed by, the online demos of archetype
project management software. In some respects, we do some of that kind
of thing already. We create projects in a database which, in turn, to
some extent automates the process of creating folders and populating
titleblocks. But if there was a comprehensive way of documenting
changes to drawings (including xrefs), and taking some of the task of
managing all of that out of the hands of our CAD monkey (me - most of
the time) I'd be interested to hear about it.

A little bit about our present configuration: In our set-up, we xref
(and 'nested-xref') drawings into a 'final drawing'. A drawing number
comprises the project number, the drawing series number (10-19 for
survey information, 20-29 for GAs, etc.) and the layout number. So
drawing 2166_20.dwg holds a number of paperspace layouts numbered
01.,02.,03.... each with its own titleblock, thus a typical drawing
number might be '2166_20_01' - meaning Layout 01 of drawing 20 of
project 2166. Also, I should just mention that, in terms of production
information, we work almost entirely in 2D - oh, and very importantly,
we print to PDF.

Are we bonkers/inspired/backward? Just wondering how other people
manage all this kind of stuff.