Thanks a lot for persevering in this fork venture. I have to ask if there will be a beta version out for public testing?

Yes. Why would we release a final public version without going beta first...?

Also, it seems that the SMF folks are finally releasing 2.0 gold at the end of this month. Are the Wedge devs going to rework everything from the 2.0 gold release, which is the recommended route to follow, as 2.0 gold will have even more bugs ironed out, so it is logical to build Wedge off of the most the stable 2.0 release, instead of customizing a bug-ridden 2.0 RC release.

We can't release a RC-based version anyway, because RCs aren't BSD'ed, even after Final gets out.
So we're keeping up with the bug fixes in SMF2, yes. It's not like there's a lot to do. We do much more bug fixing, and we don't even have beta testers for now.

How could you tell? No live website exists that's running Wedge so far...

+1!

Yup.
As for the menu -- I'm not touching it again, just like the rest. You may wanna try Wedge when it comes out!

Latest portamx fixes that i believe.

The issue is that SMF2 does support IE6 nearly perfectly, and the little man inside me keeps saying, "if they do, why don't you!"... But OTOH another little man says "that's precisely because they support it that they can't move forward in terms of design"...
So, long ago I chose the mid-way solution: make sure it's usable in IE6, but screw any concepts of 'making it look the same as other browsers'... The problem is that IE7 is also quite hard to keep in line. Not as hard as IE6, but still annoying. And IE6+IE7 = not a negligible market share.
Thankfully, most of the IE6 users are in China (about a third of the users over there...), so if you don't plan to have a Chinese version of your website or to appeal to Chinese users in general, then you don't need to bother with IE6 at all.

As for vertical alignment, my main problem really is that even for modern browsers, providing flawless alignment requires at least one extra div nesting (a display:table then a series of display:table-cell). I just... Don't like that. Also, because it uses a table layout, I would need to change the order in which cells are shown (with a float layout, it's: left-right-center, while a table layout has a more regular left-center-right.)
So basically, let's just say that I made a lot of fixes to that six months ago, and I'm not in a hurry to rewrite these fixes just to make it all work in a table layout.
In the end, I decided against going inline-block or table, and staying with my current solution. After all, it works... It just doesn't work *as well* when the header takes at least two rows. But OTOH, this would never happen in a normal situation -- only place where it COULD happen is the current posthead (a custom header that shows the topic title in large characters, surrounded by previous/next topic links in plain view). And guess what? From the beginning this one had a table layout anyway...

Ah, you have no idea how lonely it is to get into vertical alignments...
I don't know if it's related, but the resulting commit will be revision.... 666.

Thanks
As for {}, readability is seriously overrated.

CJ, have you had a look at FoxProg? (http://fox.noisen.com)
If you look into the database (not the blog itself), you'll find that it has many aspects that you're thinking of integrating into your system. You know, like the fact that an artist should be able to have several tags for them rather than just one category, things like that!