To me, the dispute is coming from what appears to be Zaretskii wanting nothing less than step 3. I can sympathize; I don't think I would want to receive a big

To me, the dispute is coming from what appears to be Zaretskii wanting nothing less than step 3. I can sympathize; I don't think I would want to receive a big pile of C were I a maintainer. It seems to me that temporary hacks tend to become permanent. However, I think he's mistaken. As you said, that list makes a decent roadmap. IMO, the best approach to hand is to take the currently offered patch, and continue to work towards specifying and implementing optimizations to the elisp loader.