A final post before I go to bed (hopefully to sleep for a change).

Jeff, at Caerdroia, has a good (albeit technical) explanation for understanding men.

Men are heirarchichal.

We are object oriented.

We define our schema in a file, whose syntax is very simple, but which requires several reboots and much swearing before it will really take full effect – little bits of old schema definitions end up cached somewhere in memory, and only come out when the right branch of a particular algorithm are triggered.

This definitely appealed to my inner geek.  And like computers, fiendish complexity is a function of utter simplicity.