Or you could just talk to folk.

But perhaps you work in an environment with a blame culture.

Some of us do.

Here in the UK the professional organization is called the British Computer Society. Full membership requires that you pass exams, have the required amount of validated experience, and attend a panel interview to be evaluated. All the usual requirements of a professional organization.

Gain entry and you acquire the moniker, MBCS. If you meet the additional requirements of their associated engineering body, then you may also become a CEng, a Chartered Engineer.

And, of course, you sign up to their charter and code of ethics.

For me, membership not only opens a lot of doors, but it makes the trust element void. I step into a business and folk open up straight away. That's what being a professional, in the literal sense, brings with it.

It also means that when folk say, "Ah, but you're not a 'real' engineer". You can smile and say, "Well yes, yes I am".

Big, big assumption.

What is actually means is that a new model will emerge. If we're going to stretch the meaning of democracy in this thread, then I'm going to stretch evolution,

But that's what we have here: variation; struggle for existence; natural selection; origin of species.

Of course, the dogmatic, conservative business droids remain wedded to their belief in "intelligent design".

The hand-wringing over blocking adds, on the basis that you are altering folks' work, in hypocrisy.

Advertisers routinely licence snippets of audio from songs. They licence from the publishers, who have the "rights", but the complete track was the artist's intention. Thus, the work is being altered.

To say nothing of an entire album. Hands up who has never played an album track without listening to the whole album?

Of course, advertisers do the same with other artwork. Just because it's "out of copyright" doesn't mean using sections of it isn't altering the artist's work.

And you can go on.

We're still at Web 0.1 (beta) and its associated business practices are far behind that.

Marketing droids need to innovate as much, if not more, than the techs. But do the marketing droids know how?

The ease of installing software on many Linux distributions shouldn't be underrated.

There, fixed it for you.

Module or code -centric, doesn't matter.

Developers develop, submit to staging, the work is tested and then deployed to live.

As you say, the problem is the database. You do indeed need "partial replication".

And that's the issue, how do you do this?

Just seems to me that the Drupal developers didn't take this into account, and it's a showstopper for multi-developer environments, especially where - with continuous integration tools - we are used to this kind of things being automated and thus requiring almost zero effort (once set up).