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3&4 How will evaluating it give me power to change the code when in fact the NDA forbids med to change the code?

How will being able to change the code help you to evaluate the software's feature set? I just don't see why you'd need to have that kind of access. There are lots of other projects that seem to be happily using the tool, so I'm just wondering why this project is different.

I have already evaluated the feature set. Twice. It's mostly good from what I can tell from the webdemos. It lacks a few things _that we can not add_.

I've used Trac as well, and while it's probably better than the current situation, I think it tries to do too many things, and ends up not being as useful. If there's a desire to solve multiple problems (source browsing, bug ticketing and collaboration, I'd recommend doing Fisheye + Mantis + some other Wiki tool, such as FinScribe.

There is no such wish that I know of even if it would be neat. It just happens that Trac beats out the other Open Source solutions as a reposotory browser and changeset viewer.

If I remember correctly, someone set up Mantis for our use a year or two ago, but a decision was made to not (or no decision was made to) use it in favor of Crunch (which I find to be hard to locate easily and kinda difficult to use).

There was a test installation but no decision was made to use it one way or the other. It was apparent at the time that noone had the time or interest to see if we could really use it. I found it to be very nice on first impression.

I'm not trying to make personal attacks, that was definitely not the point. I've been involved with enough product evaluations to know that arguments of the type you listed have resulted in plenty of worthy competitors being disqualified when they might not need to have been.

And I have been involved in enough product evaluations to know that most packages are crap in one way or the other and deserved to be disqualified. You just have to decide what areas you don't want it to stink at and find the one that looks like the least amount of pain.