Andrew,
I think Talli and you are talking forests and trees here, and that this is more of a forest-type discussion. Isn't it reasonable to assume that of the 99.9% of the world that prefers a webserver other than AOLServer, a decent fraction of them will look for solutions that support that web server?
So, in the case of internationalization, why would someone bother learning more about OpenACS if there are other semi-comparable solutions that don't require an addition to their web infrastructure? I believe that in Talli's experience, OpenACS is very often excluded from the initial short-list selection stage for this reason. It doesn't get to the point where a possible user starts worrying about what type of glue infrastructure you'd need to deploy it (what you've focused on) because it fails the web server litmus test. We can argue about whether this is fair or not, but not whether or not it happens. A lot.
This shouldn't be hard to grasp. For example, it's not like the OpenACS community thinks even a second of using Apache+mod_webdav to expose the content repository instead of rolling their own (thanks to Talli). That was a good decision, and I think that catering to other people's desire to think the same way makes sense.
Jade, portable.nsd could be deployed as a starkit with tclhttpd. Assuming postgresql will always have decent installers (deb/rpm/MSI), you'd have to work very very hard to make installing the openacs part challenging.
I've corresponded with some of the people who wrote multi-protocol patches for AOLServer. They were uniformly not optimistic their work would make it into core, which might just rule out implementing FastCGI in AOLServer. That would mean portable.nsd is the only option. I'll post to the AOLServer list and confirm this.
