Zotero is great for storing all your references in one place. Once stored, I would like to excerpt phrases from the papers in my collection and structure an outline that I can export to Word / Libre Office. I know that it's possible to highlight phrases in a PDF viewer (eg Adobe Acrobat), save the altered PDF and then excerpt the phrases in Zotero with the Zotfile addon.

This workflow is okay, but not really great. From a usability and workflow perspective, I don't really like that it takes so many separate step in separate applications. Also, I don't like the fact that the annotations from each document are kept in their distinct place (where the document is) in the user interface, without any functionality to really interact with the annotations from various documents at once and built an argumentative structure or outline from them. (Yes, I can copy & paste the annotations into a word processing software, after I imported them into Zotero, but that's at best only marginally more productive compared to just copying and pasting directly from the PDF to the Word file. A much more productive scenario would be a feature that would allow one to interact with annotations from various documents at once, built a structure and export to Word / Writer).

Are there any plans to implement such functionality, if possible at all under the current framework? I think Citavi does something similar with their "knowledge organization" features, which makes it easy not only to store references, but to actually work with them in a productive way. It might take an expansion of the current user interface concept I guess? It would basically take an additional windos that allows to drag and drop annotations into a specific order.