I don't know if this is still under discussion, or even still "live", but after reading the reverse page, and after playing with it a bit, I wanted to express a few thoughts.
First, I agree with the others about avatars. I personally don't think the potential issues and resource overhead is worth it. (And regardless, even if it's possible to activate for wikia sites, I strongly hope it's never on wikimedia sites.)
Also, as someone who has spent a lot of my wiki-editing time without having javascript activated, I sincerely hope that the technology would not cause java-less people from being able to communicate.
And also, maybe I'm not finding the link, but AFAIK, there's no way to edit the talk page itself. So for lengthy discussions, which may become confusing, or when someone uses an asterisk instead of a colon (which can screw up threading), those things cannot be fixed.
And since we're dealing with newbies, helping them with formatting is not uncommon.
My guess is that the intent is to try to isolate comments so that people do not edit each others' comments. Probably a good thing. But being able to adjust/modify/add/remove formatting would be helpful.
And that includes setting up a thread header. It is common for someone to "split" a discussion by making a sub header, once it becomes obvious that this part of a topic is no longer part of the "main" topic. so you drag out certain parts to a new thread.
Again, not changing what someone has said, (the text), but adjusting the formatting.
Maybe the way to do this would be to be able to edit a whole page as we can now, but the words are "highlighted", and can only be moved as whole blocks, and not edited when editing in that screen. Which could allow for adjusting of formatting, but still leaving text intact. (With some user right allowing the ability to edit anything, I would guess.)
Anyway, if these capabilities already exist, then I'm sorry if I wasted your time : )