About 3 or 4 years ago, I stood before a panel of library automation CEOs at the annual RMG session hosted by Rob McGee.  The discussion had taken a typical turn–why do we pay so much for these systems?  I’ve never really accepted that premise.  I always thought that libraries were paying what was required of them for vendors to do what was being asked–incremental changes to legacy systems are expensive and time-consuming.  I have put this in another more pejorative and accusatory way: vendors squandered our money doing exactly what libraries asked them to do.  But in that RMG …