The point I'm trying to make is that Zope has learned nothing from the UNIX philosophy. Yes, you can extend the config schema. You can grow new, better config files, of extraordinary magnitude. The all-powerful server will grow from being all-powerful to being all-powerful + n. It will be able to read mail. Its heralds shall sit upon mountain high throwns hewn of the finest O'Reilly and New Riders scripture. But lo, still you won't be able to do something as mundane as limit the memory the FTP server is able to consume without affecting the HTTP server.
Fracture the server infrastructure into small, seperate processes. The configuration of the individual pieces becomes trivial. The understanding of the overall data flow improves. When there's nothing left to remove from code, you've won. Some of the breaks have already been made, like the separation of the storage from its front-end. Thats good, we need more action along those lines.
You're barking up the wrong tree. Zope 2 won't change. Zope 3 is still in a state of flux, and that's where you should aim your speech. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)