Welcome to the Architecture Discussions board.
This board is open only to developers and jME development observers and is meant to host discussions (even civil arguments) about possible architecture changes and improvements. The idea here is to give a voice to those people who have the most invested in jMonkeyEngine, people like Three Rings, Gamalocus, Sun (Project Wonderland) etc., without all the noise from the rest of the forum. Ideally, the best ideas from here will migrate out to the public for some kind of review and then make their way into the engine itself.
Please remember that ideas posted here are not to be interpreted as “drop everything and fix this”. If there is a critical bug, open a ticket in the issue tracker. Also, when possible, be mindful of the community edited wishlist as there are many good ideas for future features there.
Again, welcome to the discussion and thank you for using jMonkeyEngine!
Can forum members see this forum just not post to it? If not, perhaps that would be a good idea unless we specifically don't want these discussions visible to the general public?
No they can not. We can solicit ideas on the other forums though and discuss them here freely.
i think people would feel kind of frustrated if they read about our plans/discussions about the future architecture but can't contribute themselves. would also be nice to feel that we can talk about any weird path without scaring the entire community 
so i'd rather go for the slightly more private style…
That's a good point.