How used is linking & proxies in 2.5?

I’ve been poking around with the whole linking thing and proxies in my (beloved) Blender 2.5 build. But there seem to be some limitations to it that make me think that linking and proxies (but not appending!) is still kind of an experiment. I wanted to look around in here for people playing with these amazing functions, but there seem to be rather few doing that. How many are really using these wonderful functions, and how are you using them? And how much focus does linking/proxies have amongst developers? I would really love to get an idea of where this stuff is going :eyebrowlift: