This meta-issue is supposed to advocate for hierarchical linking of objects as well as changes in scripting, that will most likely require a LSL3.
More about hierarchical linking: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Prim_and_Object_Hierarchy
The proper place for discussing these topics seems to be the "AWGroupies"-meeting and/or zero linden's office hours.
This is a meta-issue, covering a lot of different parts of the SL system, because the required changes cant be seen as individual small incremental feature-additions but must be looked at as a whole.
The scope of these changes might reach from a new "Edit linked Sub-Object"-checkbox in the SL Build menu for linked objects, to the opportunity to use bvh-animations for animating linked objects client-side. (maybe only phantom)
In general, hierarchical linking would be greatly empowering for content-creation and a very intuitive structure to build and modify objects by hand and by script.
Instead of each child-prim having a rotation and position relative to the root, each prim would have a rotation, an offset and a scale, relative to its parent.
Such a structure would be equivalent to "Nodes" in collada and other model-hierarchies.
Each prim, that is not root or leaf, could be used as joint.
To avoid interference with existing content, LSL3 should be considered once more.
To underline the real need for a LSL3, have a look at http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-93
It might be a good idea to think of LSL3 and hierarchical linking at the same time, because it could also suggest changes to link-messages and most likely other aspects of scripting.
Developing LSL3 and hierarchical linking together and restricted mixing with old content, would be very helpful for the poor developers who have to work on it and at the same time be a solid wall to protect existing content.
Sooner or later we NEED a brave Linden approaching this topic or SL will fall behind competing VWs, which will be using hierarchical models for objects.
Think of image-manipulation-software without support for layers. They wouldnt be around long, no matter how good the rest works.
As such, I propose using XPath
for searching for prims and their attributes. XPath has good market penetration, it's not difficult to use and there is plenty of documentation on it.
I look forward to making LSL a sane language with LSL3. I would love to see getters and setters used instead of having to call specialized functions.
You can find a discussion of LSL3 here:
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL3