A big user-friendliness problem I encounter when using OpenACS is simply the question what packages can do for me. I.e. there is a one-line description in the package manager.
Take for example the search package. Look at the list of installable packages and see:
Site wide search implemented with service contracts, currently only supports postgres via the OpenFTS driver.
How am I supposed to get information from this that this is a search engine that you can put on your site? Documentation from the OpenACS site suffers as well.
If people don't know what packages do, and especially don't know what you *can* do with them, it is logical that they start to code themselves.