"Currently we depend on the user configuring their nsd.tcl init script properly, we could have an umbrella tclsh (or whatever) script ask for which database, user names, passwords etc and write the script for the user"
We do. It's part of OpenACS, in /etc/install, and instructions to get it and use it are located at https://openacs.org/doc/openacs-5-0-0/openacs.html#install-with-script and linked from the top middle part of the home page of openacs.org.
