OK, I will play
advocatus diaboli now:
This year I made some experiments with fermentation that go exactly the other way.
I used the procedure descibed here:
http://www.beertools.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1693&highlight=tertiary
It goes like that: Primary as short as possible, brief secondary, and long and cold tertiary for a few weeks.
Autolysis? No, this is not the biggest thread. I'm worried about trub from cold break - it contains some proteins,
the food for microbes.
About yeast: when you rack to secondary, you don't get rid of all the yeast, only the dead and week that have already flocculated to the bottom. There is still plenty of healthy yeast in suspension, that will do the cleaning job.
The yield of the experiment was like that: a few times I got under-attenuated beer. But 4 of the beers won prizes.