> How are we going to do that? Are we ever going to make such a big 
> refactoring? Is such a big change ever going to make it to the update 
> stream?

If you're real about making such a thing the best (only?) way to do this is
to build an entire parallel class hierarchy which can replace the entire
subsystem. Just give your classes prefixes so that they can be loaded in
parallel to any existing clients, develop them up to the point where you
consider them stable and then migrate the existing clients. At that point,
you can dump the old subsystem (put it on SqueakMap for anyone who still
needs it) and just rename your entire class hierarchy.

In other words, absolutely _don't_ touch or change anything in the existing
subsystem (this is one of the major problems with Flow - last time I tried
it created some serious problems with clients which weren't migrated which
makes loading it a risky and painful exercise) - after all if you're talking
about a serious rewrite, you can as well copy a few classes, can't you?
(hint: in the Browser use "copy class" to get a starting point).

Cheers,
  - Andreas