Well I think what you are saying about Sakai is mostly true but I doubt about the “uniqueness” of Sakai. The Swiss open source LMS “OLAT” (Online Learning And Training) celebrates its 10th anniversary this year and has been kind of a role model for Sakai since it is older, it’s also Java based and its leading house is also a University (University of Zurich, but there are a lot of other mostly European contributing Higher Education institutions). Thus the slogan “by educators, for educators” can also apply to OLAT :-) OLAT just won the IMS Leadership Award for “Best Open Source Learning Platform” this year. Check out http://www.olat.org for more information. I’m sorry if I sound like a teacher but Sakai is many years younger than OLAT and has benefited from the pioneering work OLAT did in its first years and Sakai has even been inspired by OLAT’s Java code (so I have been told by Sakai developers). Which is ok since its open source but stating then that Sakai is unique is not quite correct in my opinion :-)
Greetings from Switzerland, Joël