We should start a page at mediawiki.org listing the Pros and Cons of each option.
Church of Emacs:
I'm still not sure whether RevisionDelete is aimed at replacing the old deletion schema completely, including the archive table. Could anyone comment on that please?
It's the logical evolution IMHO.
Ps.: BTW, a question that came to my mind: Do we wish to retain our bijective Pagename -- Page relationship? (As opposed to a model, where a new page data set is created when a user creates a wiki page. Our current model has the flaw, that we can't differentiate between two completely different articles that have the same page title (e.g. if article A is deleted and someone else writes article B with the same page title – they are treated exactly the same, even though they are logically two different sets of revisions)) I'm not suggesting we drift away from our current approach, just wanted to note it has some flaws imho.
They may be the same (eg. the same article recreated, page merges...) or completely different. That could be 'solved' if the parent_revs were exposed somewhere.