Joel,
You almost read my mind. This is exactly the feeling I used to have when I started my acquiantence with ACS. It was not in 1998, but it was in late 2000/early 2001 -- in the 3.x era.
It was easy to join in -- and it was a snap to put together a few useful aps guided largely by aD forums and Phil's books.
I am not a professional developer -- I am more of a tinkerer, who normally skratches only his own itch. Since the day job has very little to do with programming -- these itches rarely applicable to others.
I'll give you a sample of my nightmares -- I wanted to make a few changes to Bugtracker. It's a great piece of work -- I use it a lot as an issue tracker (with a few additional summary pages that are used to publish PDF reports for PHBs). But when I looked inside -- I got simply lost. There's so much *under* the hood. And deeper you go -- the more there is.
This is not meant to critisize Lars' work -- like I said -- it is great, work out of the box, etc. But is it easy to understand all calls in/out? What is stored in bt_bugs vs. what is in cr_revisions, cr_keywords or God knows where else? No.
I'm sure there are other examples like this -- and I agree that there are so much fewer "joyful newbie posts" on this forum (though there are also quite a few angry ones for which an "itch" is to reply "RTFM" in 1337 way). The question is whether this is a sign of toolkit maturity? Or just the fact that it is not coherent/finished/stil growing?
