The reason why uPortal is being used by academia is because of cheap labor, and lots of it. Face it there are hundreds of kids in "academia" competing for $8 to $13 per hour part time jobs. I'll agree uPortal is a great idea but the implementation is very poor. It takes a considerable amount of time to configure and even more to make it presentable. That is if you target user isn't still living in 1980's. And the default template sets incorporate an immense number of images to for the layout. On top of all of this it has a sketchy administration tool that is completely un-intuitive. After spending hours to figure out if the admin tools have any functionality, you discover the reasons for its un-intuitive nature is so is due to the difficulties one would have in writing a admin tools that are database independent. That’s right stick to the basics do everything else in directly in the database or with the api. There are good features though. It does have great XSL integration as well as other neato portlet interfaces. You have to give props for that.

So I say, if your ready to brush up on your debugging skills, become intimately familiar with the admin api and database, or rewrite the admin tools, then go for it. Let me know when it gets better. Tell then happing hacking and cracking. (the original kind that is).