[eluser]BrianDHall[/eluser]
The thing with ACL I've found is there is a wide spectrum of implementations, from ones that are extremely feature-rich and control program flow at a basic level, and ones that are extremely basic implementations of login/logout sort of functionality.
Similar with ORM, while I think it is a very powerful tool everyone should have access to, I realize that it greatly increases learning curve for new programmers and requiring them to understand it just to use CodeIgniter would be a mistake. Similarly, there are multiple approaches to ORM, and I think it pointlessly unfair to rather arbitrarily pick one to include.
The point of CI's system is how easy it is to add onto it, while having a universally useful codebase and core functions. I agree that there should be no shopping cart library, nor one for twitter or facebook or anything like that. An 'official' extension, fine, sure, but these are specialized tools best used for special implementations. Including them by default gives a barebones minimal functionality that, in my opinion, would do more to make CodeIgniter look feature deprived ("just look how bare this cart class is, it doesn't even have XYX") rather than how feature-rich it really is.
