><snip lots of stuff> 

Smooge thanks for the write-up. 

Great points are being brought up by all parties here. 

I think I'm +1 on a second repo that moves faster and can be incompatible with the right type of announce-list. (maybe even put the uri for that list in the .repo file or something). It also might be acceptable to allow builds against SCL, or bundle libs if we want real speed and end-user convenience. Obviously there's more than a little hand-waving there, so don't consider that anything more than a spitball idea. 

I like the idea of pairing with the CentOS folks for that, but I don't really know where to start there. This ecosystem has lots of information if you know exactly where to look. Otherwise, navigating it can be tricky. 

As for EPEL meetings, if we could have them again, I'd really try to be a part of it. Timing is crazy for a world-wide crew like this one.

I'm completely -1 on /opt/blah for EPEL.