Assaf writes about, among other things, REST as a simplifier of development against an existing system:
REST plays the same role as open source and open APIs: It eliminates tooling and vendoring as artificial barriers to adoption.
Steve compares “graceful degradation” with “progressive enhancement.” Mostly he takes issue (rightly) with the rhetorical spin that the former applies to the idea of building a website. But I think you can compare them with each other as if they were two different types of crowbar instead: two ways of prising open the task in hand.
It's heartwarming, really encouraging to see that Drupal 7 is undergoing a usability review. Drupal's a massively functional CMS, but all the functionality in the world won't help you when the average (for which read: can't write HTML, let alone PHP) CMS user can't discover it.
EditInline was first discussed here. It's a Drupal module that provides your site with handy editing links, inline with each node title, which rather than taking you to a separate editing page use a lightbox overlay on the current page to provide an inline editing interface.
It's currently in alpha but available under GPL on the Torchbox public subversion repository.
Developing Drupal in a development--test--production environment has a lot of advantages.