It would be very helpful to me if the JIRA REST api included a method for creating new projects (which included the ability to set all attributes for the project).

Right now only option I can see for scripted creating of projects via an api appears to be the Soap api which only has a limited createProject function that doesn't allow some project attributes to be set;
Namely as far I can see it's lacking the ability to set:

• category for the project
• issue type scheme for the project
• notification email (the email address used in the from field of notification emails)
• screen scheme
• workflow scheme
• field scheme
  So projects created via it still have to be updated by hand to set the remaining attributes. (which means we can't automate our project creation workflow fully)