"The Slashdot take on Blackboard’s setup is very informative - particularly this bit (cut down):
*It produces hundreds of megabytes of absolutely useless logs every day.
*The built in log archiving utility doesn’t work.
*It’s built primarily on Tomcat.
*Their support is nearly non-existent
*They use incredibly inefficient stored procedures which can bring down an entire system"

Read the linked slashdot thread. I'm just glad other people hated it and WebCT just as much and I wasn't just going crazy. And my new uni has it too (a slightly better version) - arrgh!