I believe there should be a way of auto-calculating geometry attributes for a feature class. Kind of like editor tracking fields in that they are system maintained and defined by the user.
For example, if I have fields meant to store Longitude and Latitude, a tab would be available to select which field I wanted to store the longitude value and which field I wanted to store the latitude value. These fields would then be system maintained and I wouldn't have to worry about calculating geometry.
A similar option could be available for polygon features...different types of areas: acres, square feet, square meters, hectares, etc, etc...