[lots of arguments in favour of AJAX snipped]

You know, I fully agree with you. I think a lot of resistance is due to the perception of sunk investments and that AJAX is a disruptive technology from the point of view of PM infrastructure. PM wasn't build with asynchronicity in mind and adapting the existing code to use AJAX throughout would be a herculean task... and even then you still wouldn't get the same payback as from an architecture which was designed to take it into account in the first place.

Yes, wanting to comment on a thread should pull down a DOM component to add the necessary editing widgets to the page. No need to re-render all those time-soaking nodelets.

Yes, voting should just push back the decisions and retrieve the node reps. Yes, the chatterbox could do its own refresh.

but...

Such enhancements would require significant time and effort to build; you'd be fighting the codebase every inch of the way.

But God, it would be nice to drag this site into the 21st century, if only from a Perl Public Relations point of view. I spoke with a C# programmer some time ago and when I mentioned Perlmonks... he knew it. He sniggered.