A metacomment: Andrew has handed us, IMHO, an insurmountable task.
I see absolutely no way we can have intelligent discussion of all these
issues in the time allotted. I believe Yakov's contribution is excellent;
I believe most contributions are helpful and good, but ruling out any
of these "identities" before nearing consensus on the semantics of each
IMHO prevents us from reaching a useful understanding of ramifications.
This email, at 200 lines, is already dangerously long, and only covers
what I consider essential for one small piece of the question before us.
what andrew's admonition does is require people to start focusing.
what yakov's message does is focus on one approach.
what all but the last paragraph of your message does is present an
analysis of that focus.
what other people need to do is emulate the careful and critical
thinking exemplified by those three messages to either focus on another
approach or to analyze the focus presented by someone else.
you are certainly correct that it's a difficult task to accomplish in
such a short time. however, it is an impossible task if the group
doesn't start to focus...
/mtr