There is a lot that bothers me about this post. First, that a library contains many different algorithms in a single framework is not a negative, nor bloat. Sec

There is a lot that bothers me about this post. First, that a library contains many different algorithms in a single framework is not a negative, nor bloat. Second, there is nothing about random forest or neural nets that are any more practical than maximum entropy or any other learning algorithm. The main researchers are both doing university research work, not building products. I'm not sure where the practical/teaching arguments come in, Weka is used in many different scenarios, including commercial systems. A brief look at the documentation suggests that this package is not nearly as extensive as Weka. Startups might care about the licence being LGPL instead of GPL. I can't comment on convenience and performance without using it a bit, but I've found that other command line driven packages are very easy to use for exploratory type research work.