Hi all, thanks Achim for this lengthy post, it's definitely worth reading for anyone who got confused by autoloading stuff once in his life (I did, who didn't?)
Now, I should have warned the mailing list about possible breakage in people's configuration, I apologize for this. There is a fix that makes the new Makefile compatible with everyone's configuration *without* requiring to add the version number directly in the org.el file. I'm discussing it with Achim and will commit it as soon as possible. "Breaking" a broken configuration is definitely not a bug, especially when this comes with a conceptually clean approach -- which is precisely the point of Achim's work. Still, a missing org-version should not prevent the whole Org spaceship to take off... so, let's bare with us a little bit. Thanks! -- Bastien