I'm still preparing for my software factories talk tomorrow at the Israel Architects user group. It's amazing the stuff that I dug on this issue. Especially all the (not so)hidden rivalry between MS and IBM over what UML should really be used for, Model Driven Architecture, Domain specific languages, MOFs and much much more.
There's certainly lots of politics still associated with this still in-flux field. In any case, it either is gonna get a whole lot better for all of us, or a whole lot worse. I don't see any way where we'll just stay where we are - someone will take us into a different future in which we build software differently, and right now it's yet-to-be decided over what and who will do this transformation.
Lots of parties have a lot at stake here, and it's definitely one of the holy grails for software architects everywhere - to be able to build stuff, and not fight it so much, to be able to change stuff, and not fight it so much.
After that, I've been getting that itch again - I want to start re-doing The Regulator, totally in a test-driven manner. We'll see how much time I can set a side for it. I also have a bunch of upgrade features I'm planning for it, and I'm still not sure if I should take up the Feb CTP of VS 2005 and use the new Avalon bits to create the UI for it. If I do, I'm going to learn a lot, but it might lead up to a dead end. I'll also have to start looking for XAML designers (which are free). Feel free to recommend the ones you like in the comments as well as comment as to what system you would like to see it built in.