Ben,
Suppose aD suddenly desided to go close source, be it pressure from their VCs or whatever, your vision will make a lot of sense and I believe ACS/Pg will gather a lot of steam.
My feeling towards ACS as a software developer trying to build some different services on top of ACS is rather mixed: ACS is in a state of flux and new features' rolling out and old modules revamped all the time. On one hand I'm hoping they can move faster - there are so many things to do. On the other it will be hard to keep up with them on this pace if my stuff goes live. So for the mean time, my plan is to stay on the tail for as long as possible until I launch.
If you have similar feeling towards ACS, due to the fast pace, unless some of the things you mentioned happen, IMHO, ACS/Pg team may spend most of the time keeping ACS/Pg in sync with aD's release.
The other implication of the things you mentioned seems to suggest to part with ACS/Oracle and continue on your own path. Unless they go close source, this may not be a good news to the still (relatively) small ACS community.
This is why I think there are only 2 viable long term resolutions. Again just MHO.
