Sorry for not following up sooner. Honestly I wonder if distributed version control systems, as currently being heralded by the open source community, might not be the answer. If you remove (or augment) the hierarchy with lateral connections perhaps you can solve some of these problems.
Of course DVCS for something as highly targeted and heavily secured as the NT code tree would open a firestorm of other potential attack vectors, but it's worth it for MS to explore those problems.
Regardless of the technical solution, this may represent the biggest challenge that MS to date has ever had to solve -- figuring out how to scale their agility has been the key to success so far and there are obvious signs that this might be a local maximum. For the good of large scale tech I hope they can crack it.
Of course DVCS for something as highly targeted and heavily secured as the NT code tree would open a firestorm of other potential attack vectors, but it's worth it for MS to explore those problems.
Regardless of the technical solution, this may represent the biggest challenge that MS to date has ever had to solve -- figuring out how to scale their agility has been the key to success so far and there are obvious signs that this might be a local maximum. For the good of large scale tech I hope they can crack it.