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After reading all the comments, looks like I should take middle way, by keeping AMS separately but slowly adding News features.
In whole duration I take over AMS development; when I'm adding new features on AMS, I keep looking at News to make sure I didn't break the database structure, so I could use any subroutine or code from News with minor rework. Leveraging on other opensource code always the best method since we have very limited time.
I didn't familiar with 'super' spotlight. I should get my hand dirty on jQuery soon, so i could understand it and decide its ok to implemet it or not.
I'm fan of Ajax, but for AMS, I'll slowly add-in Ajax on editor/submit and admin but not for article/anonymous view for SEO sake. But that plan should be on AMS 4.