HOWEVER....think of sandboxes as a "safe" place where you can experiment? Probably not something we can do indefinitely....
I agree with Kjartan... sandboxes served a purpose, but Drupal development has grown and is more formalized now. If you used the sandbox before simply as a means of revision control, there are better solutions now. Many developers now have personal revision control systems, either hosted or distributed, for their own coding. With services like Google Code, it is easy to publish and maintain code online. As far development of modules that is still in progress, IMO the recent contrib branching improvements solve a lot of that. You can now work on alpha-features while maintaining a stable working version. The sandbox as it is now is one big pile of code... mostly crap, with some active pieces buried in it. Let's clean it up. Steven Wittens