@Ryan Hellyer -
I would prefer to see the editors pulled out of core and placed into a separate plugin, along with this revisioning system and a syntax highlighter.
Agreed. (I was thinking of adding a post along those lines.) When Wordpress was used mainly by developers seeing what it could do, and didn't have a mature plugin system and repository, then it made sense that editting capability went with the product. Its a bit ;) more mature now, and the percentage of users (even administrators) who will actually want to edit the core is much smaller. Rather than adding stuff to the core that is of use only to a smaller percentage of uses, maybe a better choice is to streamline the core by moving stuff that's purely of interest to developers into plugins. If a user can't find and install an editting and versioning system, maybe they're not ready to edit a live system anyway.