I think that we are mostly in agreement.

I agree that a complete re-write is not on the cards, for the reason you gave of time, but also because I think that starting from scratch would be throwing away a lot of good code which is just wasteful. Given this isn't going to happen, what are the alternatives?

I'm not sure that migration to Everything 2 would be helpful either. Whilst it would make it easier for individuals or groups to set up replications of PM, there would still be a whole lot of customisation in the core, and sensitive data that would be impossible to share openly and very difficult to mock up.

Even if this were done, it would still mean that contributions from outside would need to be submitted to PM with a promise of "I've tested it thoroughly and it's fine!", which isn't going to work. The gods would still need to inspect for backdoors and malicious failures and test to their satisfaction. The same bottleneck would exist.

The only way I could see of alleviating the bottlenecks in the testing and approval mechanism -- beyond recruiting 100 new gods (Maybe from the Indian subcontinent, they seem to have more than their fair share:) -- is to make it possible for PMdevers to test their own code in a realistic, but non-critical environment, and in a way that allows the gods to verify the varacity of their testing (by inspecting the logs of the test system to check for errors, the number of times the modification has been exercised etc.). The only way I can see of doing that is for the test environment to be in the same box and sharing the same (live) data.

Obviously, ad-hoc changes to the live system aren't desirable, so logic led me to suggest a test server with limited bandwidth/cpu accessing the same data except for updates.

From my, very limited, external viewpoint, this is the only possibility that addresses the problems. The alternative is to stick with the status quo, which while an option, and currently the only game in town, is the reason for the disquite in the first place.

The idea is far from unique. Having test systems that referenced live databases read-only and wrote updates to a different database or a seperate table within the database was once common practice when disc storage was too expensive to replicate whole databases willy-nilly. This is just an extension of that idea attempting to work around the specific PM peculiarities. It cost nothing, except a little of my time to write it up, and a little of your time to read.

I don't have a good enough view to know if it is feasible or practical, but I thought it worth mentioning anyway.