quoting Nessari:

Am I the only one who didn't miss the 'edit type buttons are a serious pain to implement' part?

I'm curious to see what Sam whips up without them; they may turn out to not be necessary.

Maybe not - but if the problem is the typing of edits as a general feature, surely it wouldn't be necessary? For example, there could just be two versions of the "submit" button, one which does that button already does, plus another (for major edits) which also does whatever the submit button already does plus copies the edit's log entry into the What's New log in addition to the aforelinked one. Or would the implementation of that be harder than it sounds?