I want to clarify a couple things regarding my last post:
Regarding the standards used at openacs and arsdigita: I was referring exclusively to the 4.x release, which was released uncompleted due to the whole management break-down.
I never meant to bash or rant about ArsDigita or its developers. I think they did an outstanding job in many parts of the toolkit, and I am really thankful that they made it all available under the GPL (as is mentioned in our homepage and throughout our documentation).