After about 3 years of running multisite and working on some variant of "install profiles" with our whole team at Bryght, I reactivated my CVS account on Drupal.org and created the Install Profile API "module".
I'm incredibly proud of commit 62627.
As Kieran Lal of CivicSpace said at the recent OSCMS Summit, creating install profiles creates a new "profession" in the Drupal ecosystem: install profile maintainer.
It combines the consulting skills of taking business requirements and translating those into a selection of Drupal modules and configuration. It takes a bit of rigor and diligence to keep track of included modules, and listening to the community that is using your install profile.
I'm excited about the installation profiles on drupal.org. Every community can potentially bundle a custom package and easily leapfrog the (frustrating) learning stage of what module should I use and how do I configure this.
Every large organization that needs to deploy departmental websites.
Every consulting shop can have their own custom bundle when approaching projects.
Yep, I'm excited. Forward!