Lukas. We intend to upgrade the Scratchpads from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. This decision was taken shortly before our most recent Scratchpad meeting (and after the training course in Lugano). The main reasons for doing this, is that Drupal 7 now includes CCK in core and, more importantly, allows taxonomy to be extended. There are a number of other advantages that Drupal 7 will bring us, but the main one will be a chance to take a step back, and improve our current code base. It also made a lot of sense to recommend Drupal 7 for the ViBRANT project, as in three years time (the end of ViBRANT),
Drupal 6 will look very out of date and will therefore be difficult to maintain.

It's probably necessary for me to emphasise that no functionality currently present in the Scratchpads will be lost - one of the main issues you had/have with the previous upgrade. Given the experience we now have with performing upgrades, and also that we have given ourselves plenty of time to do the upgrade (we have scheduled the final release/upgrade of ALL Scratchpads to be completed by the end of 2011),
and that there will be two programmers working full time on the process, we expect this to be a much more pleasurable experience for our users.

The issue you have raised above will be looked at as part of the upgrade from six to seven. We intend to ensure that the user interface is as consistent as possible, and also that it is clean, intuitive and easy to use.

Just for the record, and I cannot emphasize this too strongly. You have your priorities completely wrong!! You neglect and break existing CORE functionality for users, and force them to relearn the site functionality all the time.
For example, batch uploading and annotating of images still does not work a full 16 months (!!!) after the D5 to D6 upgrade (my site was upgraded on 19.9.2009). And BTW, last time you also promised it would not be disruptive!! Please fix the holes caused by of the last transition first before you make the next one. Cheers, Lukas.