Brad,
regarding your second question I started compiling a package inventory document at
https://openacs.org/projects/openacs/4.7/package_inventory. It's not complete, but it might be of some help. Also, I consider the applications used by .LRN to be of relatively high quality, see listing here
https://openacs.org/projects/dotlrn/dotlrn-doc/dotlrn-installation.