I think Apache support would be great to have too. However, anything more complex than an as-installed Apache setup requires a lot of work as well; and security is more of a pain because each module can be a separate security hole.
If OACS is positioned in the "application server" space, it is competing against Java based app servers. These require (IMHO) far more work to install and manage. There are the java libraries to worry about, plus the C or C++-based libraries that the java libs use. Just like AOLserver, the JVM is a separate Unix process from Apache.
There is almost an exact correlation between the way you set up Apache plus your favorite Java app server and the way you set up Apache and OpenACS behind it. The difference is that OpenACS requires about 4 lines of Apache config and Java requires a lot more than 4 lines.
I wonder if you had just told him that the AOLserver part is the multithreaded library if he would have even noticed. In terms of performance, there is little difference between Apache with AOLserver/ OpenACS behind it, and just AOLserver with OpenACS.
