@donnacha | WordSkill - You have a knack for writing comments that are short novels. Do you have a site that focuses on WordPress? This would have made for a good post that I could link to. Not that I'm complaining that it's a comment on the Tavern :)

You want widespread adoption of hot-patching? build it into the core of WordPress without a price tag attached. I mean, if the benefit to all who use WordPress is to stay protected against the latest threats as soon as possible, attaching a price tag to that sort of makes it a little difficult if you're not running off of subversion.

As for a lot of the other stuff you mentioned, I don't see how a good competent webmaster would fall into all of those traps with bad back links and such. Also, what if the server the site is on gets compromised? Does hot-patching and such become null and does VaultPress end up in a loop restoring the site, the site gets hacked, restore the site, site gets hacked, during one of these server level problems? I know you don't work for VaultPress but I figured I'd ask :)