Since we already know two of the changes that will come from Flow, the end of signature personalisation and only three levels of talk indentation; Surely it makes sense for the WMF to put those to the community now and see if it can win consensus for those two changes?
On a less contentious note, has anyone costed how much cheaper than FLOW it would be to introduce auto sign on talk pages, with all new accounts opted in from the implementation date onwards and all new accounts opted out? We would need a button on the edit screen marked "sign my comment" so that people could uncheck an edit where they were adding a wiki project tag or fixing a typo in their post. But it would make things a lot easier for newbies. The indentation is relatively easy to pick up, but currently every welcome message has to introduce the concept of four tildas. It would be much easier and the site much more welcoming if that no longer had to be explained to newbies.
Regards
WereSpielChequers/Jonathan Cardy