As an active user of Zope (and Plone) this ZopeZen posting interested me. The reference to the article on abandoning Zope in the middle of a project hints at some of the frustrations non-insiders have in dealing with Zope (and my guess is Open Source in general).
I am one of those non-insiders and have found penetrating the sometimes obscure byzantine world (at least that is the way it appears to me sometimes) of Zope occasionally very frustrating. There is a whole bunch of good knowledge and completed projects out there to draw from but the knowledge is difficult to get and many projects are semi-complete and abandoned. "Separating the wheat from the chaff" as the adage goes is often more difficult than the programming itself. Sometimes you reach what seems to be the end of blind alley with no way out.
I don't know whether something like OpensourceXperts offers any solutions to this dilemma. Watching the activity there seems to indicate that there is a slow uptake of the idea though.
