I guess the main complaint was that given a set of indexes sharing a lexicon, deleting the lexicon and replacing it with another one had no effect on the indexes and in fact removes your ability to manage their lexicon at all. So you must replace all of the indexes to use the new lexicon by hand.
What ability to "manage" the lexicon are you talking about? The lexicon has nothing manageable once it's created, except its name. :-) IMO we should remove the external Lexicon from ZCTextIndex and let ZCTextIndex create the Lexicon for you. That means that the pipeline options need to be selected when you create a ZCTextIndex -- this is actually simpler because it's now one-stop shopping (except for the need to still create a ZCatalog). --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)