Anecdote: When I worked on the Obama campaign during the California primaries we wanted to try something radical. Everyone in Democratic races uses something c

Anecdote: When I worked on the Obama campaign during the California primaries we wanted to try something radical. Everyone in Democratic races uses something called VoteBuilder. It's this big, ugly proprietary thing written in ASP or something like that. Usually a select few have access to it and they manage everything: building walk lists, cutting turf, call lists, etc. Precinct captains and other volunteers below that level go to their coordinator to get printouts of all the relevant data. In the CA primary we decided to open it up and give precinct captains access so they could manage it themselves. VoteBuilder wasn't designed for this, of course. In fact, it frequently crashed due to the "heavy load" we placed on it. 20 simultaneous users? You must be crazy! Anyhow, this meant that we needed new features to control for privacy and such. The code wasn't available so we wrote GreaseMonkey scripts that helped us do things like create accounts en masse. These are all tech savvy people. Twenty-something, uses Facebook, Twitter, has an iPhone, etc. Let me tell you: GreaseMonkey is not easy. It's hard to get it working right and nobody understands it. If you're an engineer it makes perfect sense: a bit of Javascript that is executed in the context of certain pages, which gives you total control over the underlying website. For everyone else we just had to explain, step-by-step, how to get everything working. My point is that "just use GreaseMonkey" is not a realistic solution. It's like a Mac vs. Linux. Under the hood they're very similar, but would you rather manage ethernet cards by modprobing the right kernel driver, or having it "just work?" Both have the same result, but one has a much, much, much, much (10 more much's) steeper learning curve.