While the need for blogs might not seem like a big issue, we cater to all sizes of communities. It's true, our blog implementation is going to be basic at best, especially compared to true blogging systems, even more so in our initial release. But it will still be useful on many sites.
It's somewhat like our photo galleries. Software that is strictly dedicated to photo galleries is always going to be better, but ours serves a purpose and is quite useful for many sites.
Our initial implementation is really just going to be an extended profile page. It's not actually going to take a long time to complete. Just the ability for certain groups to create blogs that will show in their profile, where other users can comment on them. Like I said, quite basic for our initial release, but we'll go from there.
Allen is also right in the fact that the UI overhaul is a big project. Not quite as daunting as when we worked on 7.0, but still a pretty big task, so it's going to take quite a while. Pretty sure we'll split it into two releases, with the first one covering the control panel.
