I concur that the plan has been to move away from monolithic releases, and work has been put into the new openacs web site to have the infra-structure to support separate projects (with subsites, the different projects under /projects have their own subsites already). We'll even have separate downloads, separate bug trackers, etc.
So perhaps there has been some miscommunication there, so let's look at this objectively.
Regarding the especific issue of new-portals being merged into the OpenACS core and used throughout administration (instead of just being "distributed" in the OpenACS tarball), I don't know all of the issues there, and I think it is the matter for a different thread.
MIST however adds something really interesting to OpenACS, which I had toyed with in my mind while trying to figure out how to go about creating Debian packages for OpenACS and the different vertical applications based on it.
With MIST, my Debian (or other types of binary packaging) would just include automated MIST scripts to install everything the user wants.
