I'm taking liberty to summarize Trevor Parscal's points (as issued on 02/06/2012 10:20 AM) as follows:
Wikipedia is losing editors, and is looking less competitive (?). The visual editor is supposed to (help) remedy that.
If true, this is already diverting us completely from the matters of *wikitext*.
To address the (sub)points themselves, the 3 points Trevor makes are irrefutable, -- however, in a very abstract way. Yes, every visual tool is, by definition, more enabling than its lower-level counterpart.
But the further "perspective from "the visual editor team" just begs for pointing out that the lower entry threshold just can't be expected to *produce* better participation levels, as the perspective seems to suggest. It might be expected just to *stimulate* those, indirectly.
All this, however, isn't addressing quite more significant *people* problems that, as I understand, have already cropped up in Wikipedia. And I won't even start on expertise-recognition and article-baby-sitting issues.
The overall goal of the project might be mentioned, too. Over the time, the wikipedians *will* eventually run out of valid topics to write about. For major subprojects this is already in sight.
All said, what are we, in fact, discussing? I get an impression everything, down to the implementation, is already decided? I wouldn't say no to some sort of visual editor, which would work *only* with the document structure, disregarding the presentation completely, but is it even "on a table"?
Yury