The draw function has several logical steps:
1) setup/earlyDraw, where lights, pickId, culling and blending are turned on and the effect is applied
2) actual drawing - drawItem()
3) Child drawing(), where children are sorted and iterated over
4) cleanup, where the painter state is cleaned up (the settings from step 1 are restored to defaults, and the modelview matrix on the painter is popped).

Currently, only step 2 is separated out from the rest of the process, limiting a developer's control over the drawing process. The 4 steps should each be virtual functions that a developer can override in a subclass, with the existing code as the default behavior.