* There are still elements that VE can't edit;

* There are still pages that render incorrectly in VE;

* There are still likely other bugs, roundtrip and performance issues that will frustrate users.

We do want to eventually get all users to use VE, but we need to be realistic that at this point we're launching beta software that has lots of quirks, some known, some unknown. It's awesome already but there's still a long way to go.

That means power users will have _legitimate_ reasons to want to continue to use wikitext for some time; it'll be more efficient in many cases, and sometimes necessary.

I want us to be careful to not message in a way that glosses over such concerns.

I'm personally fine with the preference as an option, but we need to make sure that power users know about it. I can see the concern about a secondary "edit source" option from a UI cleanliness perspective, but again, recognizing that VE is still beta and will be for a while, I think James' argument that this may well be a better way to get power users to continue experimenting with VE (rather than disabling it in the preference) has significant merit. It could be deprecated once VE has built-in source mode switching.

Erik