Hawke! Whitespace is your friend! Well, your readers' friend, anyway! That's a lot of dense text to wade through...
A couple of comments. First of all, there are a bunch of very recent ex-aD employees who are available at the moment, so you should have a decent talent pool to select from (and there are other, non-aDers who might make good candidates. too).
I'll second the above comments in regard to OpenACS 4 vs. ACS Classic 4.2. The OpenACS 4 code base is the ACS 4.2 code base with bug fixes and some enhancements, including a new "CMS lite" that provides an alternative to the "CMS heavy" built into 4.2. Sloan/MIT is investing in a new education platform based on OpenACS 4 named dotLRN, and as part of that the portals package is being totally revamped and improved (the dotLRN system, much like ACES before it, will be portal-driven). That will be released in alpha form in a month or so.
And OpenACS 4 supports both Oracle and Postgres, just in case you've been thinking it only supports Postgres as is true with the OpenACS 3.2.
In other words, OpenACS 4 is a superset of ACS 4.2 and new packages are being worked on by a variety of people.
As far as liking the ACS better than OpenACS, keep in mind that OpenACS 3.2 is a port of a relatively ancient version of the ACS. It's a clone of a point in history. Rather than continue to incrementally upgrade and track various aD package enhancements we made the decision about a year ago to just wait for ACS 4.x to stabilize, then port that. With aD's dropping of the Tcl version, we decided to rewrite it to support multiple RDBMS rather than simply port to Postgres and here we all.
Feel free to ask questions regarding ACS 4.2 vs. OpenACS 4 specifics.
