thanks for your feedback.
although it's not highlighted on the site, there is a whole book written on the history and roots of the acs including why certain choices were made -- "philip & alex's guide to web publishing" by philip greenspun (http://philip.greenspun.com/panda). you should look through it. although openacs has made drastic improvements over those days, you can still get *a lot* of good information from it.
now... as far as technology, there are well-documented justifiable reasons why postgresql and aolserver are used.
not to be rude, but nobody gives a crap if you "hate tcl". all languages have advantages and disadvantages. the openacs is... open source. if you want a perl version, write it.
technology flame wars are stupid, so be productive and don't invite one.
anyway, keep in mind that openacs is not necessarily a website-in-a-box, although you can certainly install it and have a great, functionable website. it's a "toolkit" that provides you with the means to build and extend your own website, and it's much more than a cms alone. i would agree that this is hard to get used to when first starting out (I still am), because there is so much you can do with openacs.
your display requirements are trivial as far as implementing -- it's very easy to change the display layer in oacs.
just because you don't understand how cookies are handled doesn't mean it is insecure, poorly designed, or over-complicated.
email addresses on openacs.org are available to other registered site members, but as far as i know they aren't available to anyone not logged in (search bots).
ssl is not an openacs standard. ssl is a common networking solution that is used for general data encryption.
i'd recommend looking at that book i linked to, and reading more of the docs. if you'd like to know more about how openacs can help you, post to the forums. the people in the community are very helpful (i'm kind of bitchy, but everyone else is nice).
i wouldn't complain about your technology preferences if you do want help, at least until you have a better understanding of what is going on and have some solutions to bring to the table.
