Why is TCL always included in the 'what wrong with OpenACS'.. I've never understood that... I don't speak for everyone, obviously, but from my perspective what's wrong with Tcl is that when you search for it on monster.com there are very few hits. I've lost track of the number of potential clients who have told me that. They think they are going to end up with an unmaintainable site because "no-one out there knows Tcl". Combine that with the me-centric perspective of their existing developers, who tell them that Tcl sucks because they don't want to be bothered with learning a language that won't make their resume look better, and you have a pretty serious sales hurdle to overcome.
Adding that to the other hurdles of AOLserver and OpenACS being unfamiliar and things can get quite challenging. You can talk all you want about how client should not care about the underlying architecture and you'd be right, but the fact remains that when the IT dept is doing the evaluating, as it often is in the larger companies we deal with, they care about these things.
I personally have no complaints about working in Tcl but in the long view it's not about me or my preferences, at least not very much. It's about what our clients can feel good about putting their reputations on the line for. And unfortunately, too often the OpenACS stack ends up looking radioactive from their perspective.
