Sounds good to me. I like idea of REST moving out of core to contrib watched-over by active committer (As you suggest elsewhere, would be good to do for other 'adapters').
Any chance of a basic listing of major API differences from current implementation of REST in TRUNK? Backfill javadoc sounds important, multipart less so. On AUTH, can you not leverage the container's auth? Should be just configuration to enable BASIC and/or SSL? Good stuff Andrew, St.Ack
