Openacs is not a magic wand that can solve all the problems for you neither is experience. To identify shortcomings you need foresight and the courage to look within yourself. This I see a lot in the community.
Openacs solves a subset of problems and everyone has his subset of problems to deal with. Some overlap with Openacs some donnot and hence the thread nearing 0.5 MB.
Apart from OO what I donnot see in the community is the recognition of the fact that most developers out there are not the best or technical proficient and amazing but what they need is a tool kit that solves_their_problems without having to qualify into MIT to do that. PHP enables you to do exactly that.
To my understanding one of the reasons that Openacs is unable to attract a larger developer base or a higher degree of contributions is because we donnot think about "them" whereas you would find a plethora of applications out there in PHP world created by the same people.
Imagine the scenario if the same developer is given a powerful framework such as Openacs ,completely opensource , easy to implement or extend simple solutions , a community waiting open arms to support you for any silly problem you have apart from being sexy for development.... Openacs would really ROCK and continue to ROCK n ROLL.
