What? This is a "hollow out" approach style fork of Drupal 7.8.

• Many functions will be lifted up as-is, and re-examined for more streamlining.
• Many constants will be removed.
• Many core modules will be removed.
• A decent amount of the core concepts in Drupal will be maintained, as they are "best of breed" I believe.

Why?

• The mix of arrays and objects is messy.
• The introduction of more OO code, and PHP 5.3 requirements on some contrib modules is starting to fragment the supportability and consistency throughout the project.
• I think a few things can be done cleaner, and better. Also, it's a hobby. :)

Things to keep, for the most part:

• hook system
• form API
• drush style management
• entity/field idea (anything and everything can be a first-class citizen, and reference each other)
  • field, field_ui, but also node (node would be merged into generic "entity" type nomenclature)
• user and access management
  • may get confusing if users are managed as entities instead. perhaps userid -> entity reference is all it stores
• CSS/JS aggregation/compression
• menu router configuration
• pathing
  • pathauto, for sure
• views
• filters (input and output), text formats
• taxonomy
• logging
  • watchdog/dblog can be expensive and difficult to follow

Things to improve:

• everything should use .php extension (no more webserver "blocking" having to be done)
• file API
• cron access
• "Content Type" management should be "Entity" management
• Comments and Users will be managed as entities
  • comment should be removed from core
• multi-site; currently is too flexible, probably too much overhead
• module code living inside of the web root; ideally, it could live outside, with menu router items established
  • javascript/css would be applied using the drupal_add_css() style approach, and using special scheme:// file URI
• profiles and distributions
• update
  • make it work as well as a drush update works
• rename functions like check_plain() and such to be more descriptive

Things to reduce:

• decrease file i/o
  • less includes
  • less file scanning "magic" - heavy caching
• build-in modules - slimmer micro-kernel
• memory usage can grow large with a Drupal install; examine various ways to decrease memory usage, and CPU spikes

Things to remove:

• all objects (especially when it is only attributes)
  • bad: ->
  • bad: ::
• all OO
• PDO - remove PDO, but keep the idea of generic data access
  • generic data access may be a v2 thing. might need to get back to basics first
• built-in "core" modules: aggregator, blog, book, color, comment, contact, forum, openid, overlay, poll, profile, shortcut, statistics, tracker, translation, trigger
  • some of these belong in "beefier" contributed modules
  • the "core" should be lightweight and expose only the most optimized set of APIs, hooks, and functionality to extend upon

Standards:

• no PHP 5.3 specific code
  • no namespaces
  • no "short array" syntax
• no OO code
• whitelist of "allowed" PHP functions

Focus on the priorities and desires:

• media/asset handling
• mobile support
  • including supporting themes w/ responsive design
  • making publishing via mobile easier - web services and APIs can help
• WYSIWYG editor
  • many options; should limit options
  • syntax highlighting is broken in many setups
• better APIs
• content import/export
• native HTML5/CSS3
• content staging
• configuration management
• usability
• web services
  • fix services to use CRUD properly, and not require PUT/DELETE

Things to ensure are in place:

• testing framework
• internationalization
  • translation
  • localization
• pluggable authentication
  • authmap isn't very well documented. perhaps something better or easier to understand can be implemented
• module extensibility