Wytzke pointed me to a posting on his weblog on the direction SAKAI appears to be taking. One development that definitely attracted my attention is the 'Swiss Army Knife' approach.

'He sees Sakai becoming the Swiss army knife that does it all. And by all, we do not mean that Sakai will become a monolithic system that we all have become to hate more or less. No, actually Sakai will talk all sorts of 'languages' and standards in the near future (2-3 years from now). So think RSS, webservices, REST, SOAP, CalDav, WebDav and iCal!'

I am encouraged by this news and am also pleased they are already taking internationalisation into account. I can remember problems in the past with certain VLE's which did not support various character sets...