we have publically announced often enough that the core of 2e is essentially
frozen except for serious bug fixes and new development should happen at
package level --- all this because of compatibility making sure that documents
do work identically (as far as possible) from one maintenence release to the
next, and i still think this is the right decision.

i nevertheless begin to wonder if we should change the default font encoding
from OT1 to T1 so that more people get proper hyphenation without the need to
say

  \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

in their documents and would be interested to hear what the opinion on this
list would be (not that i consider this list a representative sample of the
average LaTeX user).

opinions?

frank