Indeed the initial tools were a mess it's true. But they've grown a lot. There's a lot to choose now. From interactive tools, to performance improvements with really interesting things like HDT. The whole situation is much better.

I understand your grief with RDF's past, but please consider judging the actual things RDF currently brings to the table.

Otherwise it's like saying that HTML was initially very cumbersome and, simply because of that, you're willing to dismiss all the cool things happening with HTML5 nowadays.

> Otherwise it's like saying that HTML was initially very cumbersome and, simply because of that, you're willing to dismiss all the cool things happening with HTML5 nowadays.

But HTML wasn't cumbersome. It wasn't (isn't) the most elegant format either, but it was simple and fun to use, people were excited and enthusiastic about it and published their pages. IMO, these early adopters were critical for making the critical mass that eventually led to the WWW explosion.

If you make the parallel -- that critical mass has never happened with the Semantic Web / Linked Data. How many Linked Data people are really eating their dog food and using RDF today? A way too little, and that's what matters.