As one who now spends the vast majority of time on programming tasks not including OpenACS (and therefore someone who's views may be out of step with the current OACS community) I agree with Don that the worst time waster in an OpenACS project (especially starting a new one) is the datamodel + procs creation process. You *could* automate some of that, but if you have to rely on code generation I think that reflects an underlying issue (as in the bloated Java web frameworks).
That's really what people love about Rails. Sure Ruby is much nicer to write than TCL, but when you start an OpenACS package you are writing sql, pl/pgsql and then tcl.
If you could define a subclass of a content repositary object and that did all the work for you, then you'd be cooking.
Working at the code level for subclassing (rather than the rdbms level) also makes it easier to upgrade to things like lazlo later since added functionality in the base class will bubble up.
