Drastic changes won't go into 4.6, you're right. And Lars and I have been talking about building tools to tap into the existing CMS code in a high-level way, making it much easier to write the kind of thin-layer CR apps that Jun talks about.
It would be nice if ETP played well with the portals package, BTW. It would be cool to be able to use it to build portlets with content as well as pages with content. That could be a lot of fun to play with.
Anyway ... I think Dave's right that one CMS-fits-all solution isn't the right way. ETP fits one set of needs, a traditional publishing-oriented CMS with content scheduling, workflow etc a different need and the kind of tools Lars and I have talked about yet another.
The nice thing about it is that a lot of the code that's needed already exists.
I also agree about the categorization stuff. We need a central service.
BTW the file storage datamodel incorrectly derives its CR content from cr_items rather than cr_revisions, which breaks the cr_item_rel stuff. I think this crept in as a result of "search" but am unsure. I'm going to put fixing that on the 4.6 todo list.
