I feel that I should start with a confession—when I was first shown the original essay “A proposal for the reform of discriminatory bhikkhuni rules”, I read the title, screwed up my face and walked away. After you have been a bhikkhuni for some time (even just a few years) you get a bit weary of having the same kinds of discussions and being asked the same kinds of questions over and over again.
Several weeks on, at the urging of nun-friend I read the entire first thread and also this second essay without making any faces at all! In fact, I am now smiling. The intention and spirit behind these threads is very beautiful.
Below are two points that popped into my head as I was reading:
1. How practical is this?
My first reaction was how exactly is this going to work? My experience of Sangha life is quite limited having only ever stayed at Dhammasara Monastery in Perth (and some brief periods at a monastery in Thailand). But I do know that it is difficult enough to get a community of even 15 people to agree about fairly mundane things. For example, we started a process of revising our Korwat a few years ago. After many months of very looong weekly meetings we managed to come up with a draft. There were some some particularly controversial sections, such as laundry (!), which we had said we would revisit and finalise later. We have not yet had the courage or time to finalise it. It would seem impossible to get large Sanghas to agree on what rules were actually laid down by the Buddha—even if you just focused on monasteries in English speaking countries.
How things seem to evolve is that one group seems to do something well and then others will follow. For example, whatever combination of factors that Luang Por Chah brought together in terms of how to live monastic life and how to run monasteries obviously worked quite well (for monks at least) and has been franchised in many different parts of the world.
Now that there are bhikkhuni communities living and growing in various places around the world, they will naturally find a way to live these rules, in a manner that works for the contexts that they live in. For example, at Dhammasara we have had discussions about the Garudhammas, as part of revising our Korwat ( mentioned above). This is how I remember it: we agreed that at our monastery we would keep only the Garudhammas which are in common with the Pacittiya rules. We also agreed that we would do whatever we felt was appropriate depending on the context we found ourselves in. Although each monastery can be run independently of others, I still like the idea that I am part of a Sangha that extends outwards in both historical time and geographical space.
Interestingly, the discussion about the Garudhammas was much quicker and less painful than the discussion about laundry!
2. Shouldn’t the spirit of this endeavour be to find out what the original rules were?
It seems rather flawed to start from a place of wanting to shape the Vinaya into a form more acceptable to “us,” whoever you think that “us” is.
Based on this, I kinda like option 2 the best. 
Why is it “quite conceivable?”
If the ‘reforms’ are to be grounded in the EBTs and if there are pacittiyas that are common across all the schools, then how can we just disregard them because they seem discriminatory to us? If comparative studies show that certain rules are present across all the schools, even if they are ones that make life as a Bhikkhuni difficult, I would feel more comfortable with re-interpreting them in a sensible and liveable way instead of abolishing them altogether.
I don’t know much about text critical studies and I don’t even know what "lectio difficilior potior" means, but in general I thought we should interpret the teachings based on those that are repeated again and again rather than focusing on things that look a bit strange?