>  I ran it against the FitNesse TestSuite and couldn't see any tremendous increase of memory consumption. 

How big is that test suite? How did you measure the increase?

How hard would it be to have a TestClass pool in your new runner?

If we extracted a public static utility method in an appropriate class, could that resolve the duplication? 


I'm just concerned that this is more of an invasive change then necessary, and might have some unintended consequences. Currently, `withBefores()` etc is simply an extension point that subclasses can override to replace the current behavior. Subclass could call the base class implementation, but the expectation is that they would do so in their overridden implementation. Now we are elevating it to a utility class for calling `@Before` methods on any instance.