It's not trivial to maintain both environments and make sure the work you do for one works for the other. I've done it when I was at Sloan, and it did add a good deal more the the development time and it's frustrating....
I'd vote for a process where it was easy to contribute with one, but also that we are organized enough that others can use the other.
We do want OpenACS to be used by a wide audience... and to a large extent each of us only has so many hours in the day and so much energy. It's fun to be part of the community and in an interchange where we help each other out.. and some time people just have to get the bills payed. To some extent, this takes a little more effort from participants.. and that level of extra effort should be reasonable.
I don't believe anyone is suggesting that we'd do anything with OpenACS so that there was a large obstacle to using Oracle. Or that someone else couldn't jump onto the team and volunteer to do that work.
It's just that the current arrangement (meaning Don doing the vast majority when he doesn't need it at all) isn't working.