Fountis and Pinell is pretty decent in many ways. I haven't used their system, but am familiar with it, and their general approach is grounded in higher level types of comprehension (inference and synthesis vs. recall/literal comprehension).
The only issue I see is proper placement. My dd7 just finished first grade. She was in a reading group with second graders. The pace was too slow for her.. the other girls only wanted to read a chapter each night whereas dd7 would finish the book in 2 days. They started the year on level j and completed the year on o. The group remained constant.. there was no movement from goup to group. In kinder, there was movements as some kids wee progressing quicker but not this year.
I think the issue you raise is an important one, but not related to the reading system/materials per se. Gifted readers should not be part of paced reading instruction--breaking a book up into little artificial chunks and waiting for everyone to be ready to discuss it simply doesn't work for these children. By the time everyone else is ready to talk about it, our voracious little readers have already devoured umpteen other books that they'd rather talk about, and they probably don't even care about the little chunk of the group book they read two days ago. Or, they secretly read ahead and have to be silent during discussions because they are worried about referring to information from the wrong part of the book. Either way, it's a bad match. Our education system has to get better at recognizing that reading level and reading ability are not the same thing. I would argue that level is just a part of ability. Ability is really a triangulation of level(fluency and comprehension), pace and appetite.
