I would not call hacking the tcl code of OpenACS to customize your site the 'wrong way'. After all this is a 'toolkit', not an out-of-the-box-do-everything product - in fact if every tiny little thing that one can imagine someone wants to customize would be a parameter setting it would become quite unusable.
We need a good out-of-the-box look, that's true. But for something like context bar separators I don't have a problem of telling people that they have to modify some tcl code. If the api-doc would be more often written with that customizability in mind it would be better.
And it would be great if there was an easier way to maintain local customizations and OpenACS code than with CVS vendor branches. Maybe arch will fulfill that need.
Nagita: I think you are referring to this: http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/community.html scroll down to 'Try to solve 100% of the problem or 40%?'. I agree with the views in there and wish OpenACS would stay on the toolkit40 side instead of tending towards the toolkit90 approach.
