bumping this because i'm admin on a honda forum that has half a million members and about three million threads. the issues we face and the vast amount of troublemaking personalities are incredible, but editing issues are never a problem. whereas here, many times i want to add info to a post and realize i can't, which is very annoying and unncessarily bumps the thread if i want to add something. it can also create confusion when posters respond to a post even though down the line it was corrected in another post by the OP or something to that effect.
in vB, as staff, you can observe/compare post edits vs. the original post, so if problems arise it's easy for staff to fix it.
my thoughts are the benefit of having extended edit times outweigh the slim problem of users abusing such edit privileges. it makes life on a forum much easier and streamlined.