I don't know exactly what Lars added, but he did use the patches that I mentioned a while ago.
If Lars did use the existing template::paginate and ad_table then there is at least one serious limitation and that is that sorting only works on the returned result set not the whole data set.
My version is not only much simpler, it doesn't use caching and also sorts the whole result set before it is returned. It is also written from scratch. It is not a feature complete replacement yet, but it is good enough for everything I have come across and Brad Duell is also enhancing this with me for our project.
