Stan,
I worked on HEAD while doing the majority of the work. I switched to oacs-5-2 when we branched because, at that point, I was working mostly on very small UI fixes. In any case, I really haven't touched the data model.
Moving forward, I've have some plans to do more work on CMS in the near future and I'd like to be working on the same branch as anyone else contributing. From what I've read of the CVS docs, oacs-5-2 is the proper place to do this work.
Wrt your question about symlinks, the index page of the sitemap module calls an sql function that resolves symlinks before presenting any information. I don't use symlinks, though, so I haven't really exercised any of that code. You can't symlink to content outside of an instance though. At least not with the current UI. Sounds to me like you need some workflow type functionality. This (simple author->edit->approve workflow) is, in fact, what I plan to start adding on soon via integration with the workflow module.
