Very interesting post, Steve. Thanks for providing your insight about newsletters and Drupal. Can you explain to what extent oemPro is integrated in the site you link above? Did you receive help from Octeth with this integration?
Developers have been frustrated for a long time with the difficulty of 3rd party script integration. Better authentication methods have been part of forum discussions for quite some time now. Joomla's upcoming 1.1 release includes "Userbots for extending authentication methods". More info is available here:
I provide this information in no way to discount Steve's post. I am hoping to make existing Joomla / $ambo users aware of how the core team is addressing these important issues he has brought up.