> The point is to allow a manageable discussion to take place around 
> points of contention

That can be done as (possibly inline) comments on bitbucket on the individual commits.

> while making forward commit progress along the way.

I'm not sure how you intend to do that, but feel free to propose what you have in mind.  As I see it, there's a bunch of text written assuming that there is a single clone or multiple not shared clones, and all this needs to be replaced and updated.  You can probably extract a couple of chunks, but that won't make a difference IMHO.

> the current massive batch of changes makes it too unwieldy.

Maybe you are overestimating it.  It's really not so massive: it's 8 changesets, 2 just remove stuff, other 2 just move existing content without adding/removing anything (so there's nothing much to review here).  Of the remaining 4 changesets, the first only adds 85 lines, the other 3 change about 20 lines each.