I received six off-list responses, alongside three onlist ones.

LIKES

• Simple to get running, a lot of bang for the buck (3 mentions)
• Checksum checker (3 mentions)
• HTML display engine (3 mentions)
• Search engine: "simple and fast" (2 mentions)
• Manakin theming (2 mentions)
• Legible displays, easy structuring of data and depositors into communities/collections
• Flexible Dublin Core, easy defining and rebuilding of indexes
• Storage in SQL database
• Easy to showcase and share data
• Community spirit and visionary dedication!
• Configurable submission workflow, metadata templating
• Maven dealing with Java dependencies

NEEDS/ISSUES

• Complexity of authorization/permissions system, poor fit with real-world workflows, too much work for DSpace admins that can't be delegated (5 mentions)
• Communities/collections model confusing and unintuitive for end-users (3 mentions)
• Submission process needs streamlining and simplification; input-forms.xml needs to be end-user editable (3 mentions)
• Allow bitstream updating/addition after deposit by users and collection administrators (me, George)
• Doesn't automatically feed people into user groups based on LDAP group membership
• Allow depositors to withdraw their own items
• Difficult to customize; also, moving to Manakin costs functionality
• Documentation scattered and confusing
• Can only use Postgres and Oracle databases
• Too-close integration with handles

DESIRED NEW FUNCTIONALITY

I tried to exclude this from the question, but I got a lot of it anyway!

• better i18n (community/collection descriptions, metadata-input forms) (3 mentions)
• statistics (per item, per author) (3 mentions)
• batch import of citation-only references from a single document
• web UI to prompt a reindexing
• add "also by" (author) or "see also" (subject) links to item pages
• persistent bitstream handles/URLs
• HTML in metadata (e.g. abstracts)
• embargo support
• bulk metadata editing through a web UI