Oh, one more thing -- while many of the responses to what I've written were inappropriate, I do realize that the tone of my posts had something to do with that.  When I wrote the post at the start of this thread, I was focused on getting a clear description of what I was trying to say.  What I wrote may be valuable because it's a factual record of the reaction of someone looking at OpenACS for the first time.  The downside is that I did not focus enough on writing in a way that would be palatable to read.  I now believe that this was a mistake.  This is a mistake that I am prone to making from time to time and I have to be vigilant about it.