I've had a Vanilla RLC and Minute 1 on my Turner XCE. The Vanilla is very supple. Verrrrry supple. The rebound is nicely tuneable and bottoming can be controlled precisely through oil height. The fork si stiff, looks great, has fantastic tire clearance, and has a generally high quality feel (nothing plastic here). The is a "knock" at topout when set to 125mm sometimes. It is the spring support rod tapping against the stanchion wall. The Fox has really very unsophisticated compression dampening. There is nothing special about the fork when you get up to speed and start whacking through the rocks. There is some wallow and compression spike. It seems to eat up its travel pretty fast, and when you run out, you know. The oil seals wear out and leak pretty fast. All in all, an excellent fork showing its age.
The Minute 1 (04 model) is also quite stiff and nicely finished. The "travel wind-down" is a very cool feature which works well to maintain spring rate over a range of travel settings. The little travel setting window is easy to see when on the bike and dialing in the travel ok, though it does take a few turns to go through the range, and when increasing travel you have to unweight the fork a few times. It is only an operation you do when you don't have to pay a lot of attention to the trail for some distance. The rebound knob SUCKS. THere are no detents (clicks) and so dialing in a setting is pure guess work. The rebound is also at the bottom of the leg so you have to stop to change it. It has a mushy, winding-up feel to it. Just pathetic. The results are good, the process is bad. The fork is not that supple at slow speeds over little stuff. THe one I rode may not have been completely broken in, and I would need to give it a few months and an oil change to really do it justice, but I cannot see it ever feeling like the Vanilla. Where it spanks the Vanilla up one side and down the other is when you hit about 10 mph on a rough trail. The fork really shines at speed. So smooth and controlled. No spikes, no noticeable bottomout, no ramp-up. Just very high quality travel. I personally don't give a poop about bob-reduction in a fork, so I could live without SPV's activity filtering, but it sure makes for nice compression dampening.
To sum up: at walking speed (slow, technical work), Vanilla all the way. Above walking speed (bombing along), Minute, no question. Mated to a Pushed rear? Most likely the Minute. Especially in 05 when the SPV guts are supposed to allow for much greater small bump compliance. In stores soon. How does that compare to the 05 Fox forks? No idea...