The absolute/relative url debate began with developer named Marcus Pope sharing two new plugins with the list. The first enables relative urls (but there are problems and it would be way more straightforward to have the functionality built in hence the debate).
The second plugin changes the behavior of Wordpress' wysiwyg editor so that it doesn't ruin any formatting you set up when you used the regular HTML editor. The idea is that this way people who prefer to edit raw HTML and people who prefer a more graphical environment can work on the same content without stepping on each others toes. There seem to still be some bugs with this second one and I was considering helping him out with it.
