Robert, thanks for your excellent post! If nothing else, I learnt about GNUE which looks pretty sweet.
Also let me say that if you can follow the OACS new application tutorial you are no PHB - and I have worked with some real PHBs in my time...
You are 100% right about the sex appeal. The only thing you are a little off the mark in my opinion is that TCL is a limitation. You are right that any half-baked programmer can learn TCL, but we have so many hacks in place to work around TCL's limitations that some of our libraries approach wizzardry - by that i mean they work - it's damn impressive - but you just pray you'll never need to uderstand how it works! Cf. ad_form (whose internals I now understand, but it took a long time...)
With the will and time however, we can solve many of the TCL/API limitations with tools at our disposal (OO TCL, ns_perl, etc.).
Also with the will and time it is not hard to build sex appeal in the site - the framework and community already have sex appeal (as long as we ban developer portraits ;), we just need to strut our stuff a little more with the web look n feel and writing magazine articles etc.
Speaking of UI sex appeal, we really need to get the .LRN redesign that Collaboraid did into cvs :
http://www.collaboraid.biz/developer/blog/archive/2004/05/
The new error/alert bar alone is worth 100 sex-appeal points. You know it's true ;)
Thanks again Robert - we all know what you say is true, but hearing it from the outside brings hope ("A man finds joy in giving an apt reply- and how good is a timely word!" - Proverbs 15:23)
