Not so much a particular wish (at this stage), but more of a point I'd suggest to put on a dedicated list of test scenarios: During the 3.x phase we've seen repeatedly DMA problems with CD-ROM devices (mostly on older systems). The most
recent one has triggered me to write this post.
I am one who still owns such a system, but I pretty much only boot it with TC to investigate for example possible hardware issues. I've noticed a kind of regression in the "out of the box" behaviour in this area between TC 2.x and 3.x: there are warnings etc. when booting 2.6.11, but it will eventually work, whilst 3.x gets "fatally stuck" on this problem (if not using the 'ide-core.nodma' boot code). Combine this with reports that others (like Puppy) are not showing those problems one likes to think that we've got an "unfortunate" kernel config in 3.x.
I don't think it's serious enough to try to track it down on the current kernel, but I think it would be worth comparing kernel configs of others (like Puppy) and attempting to test things when we move to a new kernel.