I've been traveling most of the day and I am cutting an AS release and working on a presentation for a JBUG I need to do in a couple hours, so I don't have much time to comment a more detailed reply to the topic (sorry!).
Breifly, I just wanted to mention that my primary concern was having a solution in ANY EAP6 release. To me this was an escalated AS + TS integration problem that everyone agreed needed to be fixed, so whatever stop gaps we go with need to be short lived, and 2 years is just too long to have this issue. I realize that getting this into EAP 6.0 was a big stretch, but the work should be able to start now, and as I mentioned in the past fixing EAP6 integration issues is more important than any EAP7 feature. I definitely want to avoid doing a one off patched fork, but after hearing that no changes are allowed to happen in the only release branch that is compatible with EAP6, that appeared to be the only option. We do have resource constraints for 6.0, but 6.1 we have breathing room so can "make things happen".
I promise to explain in more detail later, but hopeful that clears up my position somewhat.
Thanks.