As someone who writes so reflectively about patron experience, it seems like a bit of fluff when it comes to real life.

Start practicing what you preach.

You are spot on in your observations as usual! Unfortunately, the reality is that, similar to technology, information/knowledge and the design of interfaces for manipulating information that leads to knowledge creation/learning, is a function of: 1) trying to meet the lowest common denominator (we all work in different ways and have different needs), 2) the most scalability (the most bang for the buck), and 3) for the least amount of short and long-term costs (delivering proactive, point of need service gets unavoidably, exponentially costly in terms of personnel, workload and just plain funding as the quality goes up).

I believe this is true for any organization or business, and is why business models, which have been evolving for thousands of years, still more often than not fail so miserably at customer service.

Of course libraries and library services and systems are especially bad at this stuff and we librarians do need to improve our service and knowledge facilitation (to steal from R. David Lankes SUNYLA keynote) design models quickly across the board if we want to remain relevant (and employed).

Just my three cents.
Dana