first impression of Bestpractical's RT, an open source ticketing system

I heard quite a bit of good things about RT, an open source ticketing system.  Here is the first impression I had after retrieving the source tarball off bestpractical.com's web site.

The current stable version is 3.6.1.

Per README in the source tarball,

• "RT is an enterprise-grade issue tracking system. It allows organizations to keep track of what needs to get done, who is working on which tasks, what's already been done, and when tasks were (or weren't) completed."
• GPLv2
• commercial support is available including training and such: sales@bestpractical.com .
  

The installation seems a little too involving, even for a professional UNIX/linux system engineer.

• it requires Perl >5.8.3 with a lot of CPAN modules. To the developer's credit, a RT util tool is built to help get CPAN modules and compile them in place.
  
• It support a few RDBMS as its backend: MySQL/Postgres/Oracle/SQLite
• Apache with mod_perl (or FastCGI)