Let's just say Jon is right what needs to be done and I think it is good to have it written down. Will we have the time to do it? Well, I start to use XoTCL already quite a lot. I offered to write the code that lets you edit the templates and css files, yet was stopped by Don who wants to clean up the current issues with templating and CSS before going down that road.
Moving to naviserver is an option, but at the moment, who has the time to test it? Gustaf did this at some time so he would probably be able to give a good introduction what he found out.
As for moving stuff out of OpenACS, feel free to do it. I guess we have enough on our hands to get stuff into OpenACS to think about abstracting stuff and get it out 😊.
No need to start a flame war. OpenACS is a niche product which allows us especially with the latest version of xotcl-core, to really go wild and quickly develop applications. But it is a niche product and if it werent for ]po[, aims, xo* we could just call it .LRN. And I would strongly ask the .LRN crew to think outside the box and make sure (before releasing) that things still work outside .LRN.
We did a mistake with the 5.3.1 release especially with regards to the large amount of changes that needed to be done there. Hopefully a lesson has been learned and we can clean up the situation by the 5.4 release.