I have to say I'm happy to see such a great discussion on this. To answer my own question: yes, it seems there's _quite_ a bit of interest in the topic!
There's already been some good news... refs are now location agnostic! With a little work you can implement CITEs "out of band" with only a minor side effect. I used Jesse's method in the water memory article and the effect was fantastic, the article is much easier to edit now. Can anyone think of an easy way to eliminate the "b" links that point into the hidden DIV? Maybe without any changes to cite.php? And a later discussion about using REFs to point into a separate "sources" section containing the CITE bodies is a great solution too, although it does spread the cite bodies out. I'm not sure if that is ever a problem in practice though, I'll just have to try it out on a few articles and see how it feels.
It seems like the idea of being able to have separate "references" and "notes" struck a chord. After reading over the posts again, I think I've come around to the "section=" line of thought, instead of the separate <note>. Steve's message was particularly well taken. You just have to see one example to "get it", and you'd have to for a new "notes" tag too. There's been lots of good discussion both ways though.
We still have the problem of referring to different pages. There's two lines of thought here, one is to have a "page=" or similar, and another just to allow the "pointer" refs also contain text. Maybe both? The discussion was particularly interesting because other editors had different ideas on how to use the whole concept that I hadn't thought of. I'm more convinced than ever that this is really something that would help a lot of editors out.
And then there's the whole discussion of templated CITEs pointing to a central repository so they can be re-used in multiple pages. Definitely useful. I have a mining book that I will be referring to in a bunch of different articles. If I could make a single template CITE for this book on my userpage somewhere, then linking to it with an added page number, that would be seriously nice.
So has anything sent up any red flags yet? Ævar, in your opinion, does anything here seem too difficult to develop to be worthwhile?
Maury