In my opinion the work Caroline did on the latest version of forums on her homepage looks great. If she could commit this on HEAD and Viaro would add their collapse one/all button using Ajax, this would be awesome.
In my opinion, if committed to HEAD noone can complain we broke forum, as anyone enjoying the old design could still use the stuff on 5.2.
Furthermore, all my clients have complained heavily about the look and feel of forums, but I don't think it makes sense for SolutionGroove and cognovís to go ahead and just use a different forums package. Although, we could create "forum-new". But IMO the new design is better by an order of magnitude so we should not have to consider the option of retaining the old forums package in HEAD and keep two versions of forums in the branch.
As I heard from Caroline, switching the design back and forth is hard to write, so I can understand her (and my) reluctance not to do it, especially as we don't need the old design.
So, unless there is a huge outcry, I would propose she commits her stuff on HEAD.
As for the Viaro Ajax: It does not work correctly. The "open/close all" should open/close the current thread and it's children. At the moment it randomly (so it seems) closes and opens threads that come below it.
