I suspect if you had a marketing department you'd find that they consist of something more like:
* Unsophisticated end users
* Somewhat knowledgeable end users, including non-technical business decision-makers
* Power users / alpha geeks
* Developers (primarily interested in integration work)
* Developers (primarily interested in customization work)
* System Administrators (various levels of expertise)
* Actual and potential contributors
Your site probably can't be all things to all these groups, even though there is a degree of overlap between some of them.
Speaking from personal experience as a developer with primary expertise in line of business applications and (gasp) Microsoft technologies, but with some minimal *NIX background ... in other words, "primarily interested in integration work" ... I found your docs uneven, with a lot of gaps and assumptions. I eventually pieced together a workable bridge to our DotNetNuke portal using Mono, but there was more trial and error involved than I would have thought necessary. Installation was something I ended up outsourcing to a Canadian firm, which got me in the ball park with shell scripts I was able to tweak for a successful migration. I even slung a few lines of PHP in the process.
I doubt you contemplated the likes of me as a user in your original vision for SM (much less the hapless end user that Steve basically crapped on). As the product gets out there, it will continue to get used in ways you didn't anticipate, by people you would not normally give a lot of respect, much less the time of day.
If there is one single thing you could do to make the product more useful to such folks it's probably to spin off a commercial version of the product and package it in friendlier ways with some hand-holding consulting services for installation, configuration and integration, such as what I bought. Or, provide some training and materials to help third parties get up to speed with that sort of thing.
Beyond that I think you are probably just going to try to be something you're not, and fail miserably at it.
For what it's worth ...
--Bob
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