Malone's Severity and Priority fields have social and practical problems. "Severity" implies something that can objectively be set by bug reporters, but reporters and subscribers overestimate it for a variety of psychological reasons. And Priority is not useful as long as Severity exists, because some people treat Priority as a subdivision of Severity (major P4 > normal P1) and others don't.
To solve these problems, and to make Malone simpler, Severity and Priority should be merged into a single Importance field (like Plone Collector uses). This field could have the values "-" (unprioritized), "Trivial", "Minor", "Medium", "Major", "Critical", and "Urgent".
This is part of <https://wiki.launchpad.canonical.com/SimplifyingMalone>.
Well, they aren't entirely redundant. It is a bit of information that /might/ be nice to capture, but the only reasonable place to capture it is in the bug filing page, and the text would need to be carefully prepared to help the user pick the right option (as discussed in the Montreal sessions).
I am unsure whether in practice the UI can make this a useful feature or if it's hopeless. I'm okay with removing it on that basis, as I am with experimenting us using the Montreal-designed bug filing form (!)