I've been using Debian's MTOS for a client and so far it seems quite different than the versions that I've been basing Mutable Times off of. All in all, I really like MovableType, and I think its perfect for what my client is using it for, but there are still a bunch of things I want to modify.
I'd like to speed up performance to the database when the database is remote - as well as revisit the idea of having two different dsns for reading and writing to different database servers.