Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but saying the community edition is dying a slow death is very over the top (and completely incorrect) in my opinion. If anything the venture capital funding/PE edition has been a great boon to the CE version.  In the past the majority of the new features were added by a relatively small number of people (Charles, Shaun, Joe and Nik - all corporation employees), with others added by trustees/project leads/code grants. Now that there is funding, more people have been hired and more ambitious features have been planned and are getting delivered in smaller timeframes. Many of these are built into the core, so are automatically available to CE as well as PE users, but some are custom enhancements/extensions/modules to differentiate the PE edition from CE , to help with sales. Any additional paid time spent developing features that end up in CE is a bonus for everyone (DotNetNuke corporation has consistently said there will be 1 common code base - this is not a situation such as redhat which bifurcated their community with fedora/EL)

Features such as content approval, UX and content meta data have ben on the planning board for some time, but realistically would have taken significantly longer (think at least 1 year rather than 2 months) to deliver when working with a set of volunteers than with a mixture of fulltime and volunteer efforts. Noone is forcing you to purchase PE, it's a value judgement as to whether you want these features, or will use custom modules/write your own code. The expectation is that most people will continue to use CE, enjoying the increased number of features delivered at a faster rate, but that others will see a benefit in PE and decide to use that version . The feature set reflects that i.e. if you're needing to consider webfarm caching scenarios you're probably operating sites with huge numbers of users/pageviews/revenue, so the PE fee is a drop in the ocean.

As for potential forks, thats always possible with any opensource project, due to licencing. However, most forks die a death as theres much more to creating a new version than simply starting a new community and expecting everyone to switch. In fact all you have to do is look at other opensource cms's such as drupal (with acquia) and umbraco, and see that this model is tried and succesful, and did not lead to disintegration of their communities.

 Cathal

As tom's email stated (and Joe has posted on a number of threads), the roadmap is coming soon. I would expect the roadmap would have more detail than the few bullet points in tom's mail.

This is exactly what's happening in the core. When 5.1 comes out , the PE version (which once again is just the CE version with a few changes/extensions/modules overlaid over it), will have to be rock-solid as the Corp provides support (to quote http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Products/ProfessionalEdition/FAQ/tabid/1252/Default.aspx "Guaranteed product issue resolution through premium support channels, enhanced resources and immediate attention from experts most familiar with the framework"). If the core is not in a good state the Corp will have to do huge amounts of support, effectively killing their business model. This is just common-sense to me - in fact just as many people don't choose to go with major jumps such as 5.0, but wait for the next iteration (5.01./5.0.2) as historically speaking they're more solid releases, I expect in time some people will only choose to upgrade to CE versions that a PE version exists for, as it will again be a more effective guarantee of a quality release (obviously security upgrades live outside this scenario)

I don't think the community ever get's yelled at for not testing 5.0 enough, however it's a simple fact that even after a lot of beta releases and ever increasing audiences of testers, 5.0 was not where we wanted to be quality wise. This is just a statement of fact, not an accusation. Either not enough people tested it, or people tested "happy-path" scenarios, or only a small part of the application. This is a key reason why additional resources that can perform testing are a valuable boost to all dnn users. 

Cathal

I'm sure all that will be covered in the roadmap, I'd recommend you wait and see what that contains. I believe it's not far off being released and all the information is available to everyone at the same time.

Cathal