In the old days, this thread would have been bursting with pictures of moose, girls in the shower, and cheese about five hundred posts ago. Now, it's taken almost eight hundred posts just to get Anna to check in!
-- KotS
More seriously, there have been some improvements from last year, as well. One stray tag doesn't make the whole thread blink now, and splitting the thread into groups of 50 or 100 is great over slow connections.