Keeping it simple - is it too late?

I found a very provocative post by Derek Morrison on the Auricle weblog.
Derek argues that we are all walking in a sort of tunnel, because of limitations of current VLE's.
Just a quote: "(..) VLEs are pretty poor content aggregators but yet, in the absence of alternatives, they've taken on that role in education by default. But yet, in the non-education world, I can set up my RSS aggregator and Podcast download application to either bring to my attention what's current or even to download automatically the content I've identified as valuable to me to my preferred player/reader device; that's an example of a discrete and very efficient tool which doesn't require a complex interface or an expensive recurring license to allow me to use it, but yet it does some pretty powerful things."