1. It's not the interface.
Have you used Napster? It's as bare-bones a user experience as 'most anything, and users would still be lining up to get hold of it even if it were command-line based. Shawn Fanning has bemoaned the rapid success and almost equally rapid legal miasmas Napster encountered, because he still isn't done with the interface. According to Fanning, Napster is really at about the beta level of the product he'd want to have constructed.
The lesson for theological educators: Pictures, Flash animations, frames, MIDI music playing in the background, Javascript scrolling message space, all may enchant the Board of Trustees--but they all use up bandwidth for something that's beside the point. If you offer people something they want to find, they will come.
You don't need to reason from Napster; if you prefer to get this message from consultants, ask any of the "useability" experts (Jakob Nielsen, Vincent Flanders, David Weinberger, et al.).
Content is king.
All this is the more urgent and true for those of us who have been entrusted with a message, not a design. I love design, I used to work in design, but design has to come second to content.