The single cycle thing isn't necessarily relevant for Smalltalk, but those "extended" bytecodes are really distasteful to me.
I find them distasteful too. I also find the multiple object header formats equally distasteful. OTOH, every little bit counts when trying to minimise the size of the image -- and there a more than a few people putting Squeak to work on severely limited machines.
Well, bytecodes do have their place, of course ;-).
But it's great to hear you guys finding the whole current mess distasteful...
Fire up those new-age compilers and take us into the new world!
- D