Also read the Mythical Man Month - recently reissued me thinks. It has a good chapter on what happens if you throw away the first design because it was too crappy. It is chapter 5 - The second system effect (to which I and others had refered to a couple of times)
The .LRN portal framework code is awful and contracted, but it cuts it for the user. We should stick to it for the time being until someone has a compelling replacement.
As it is very unlikely that someone will have a compelling replacement we should continue to work on the current code :)
