Hehheh, I doubt I’ll be doing any contributions, my programming skills aren’t quite up to task. Personally, I MUST use ODE even in it’s current clunky implementation (notice how complicated defining ODE collision object is compared to the native ones?), the Panda collision system hasn’t been fast enough for my needs so far. I may need to do more tests on the matter though… 
EDIT: Oh yeah, I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I heard there’s a PhysX implementation of sorts in the CVS too. Doesn’t work very well yet it seems, but it might give an excuse to do more of an abstract collision system that’s less dependent on the actual collision system used beneath the stuff visible to the average user… 