Hi Ray, I think Open Source, Customization, etc. are benefits, not features.
Features I see as something like "In the forum module, I can collect all student posts in one sheet and grade them at one time". Ironically that was one of the main features Moodle lacked at the time the decision was made Peter's old post refers to.
I've been on both sides of a number of RFP selections, and I will say that often there is a feature count, and the application that loses it often loses the competition - even when these are features that very few of the faculty use (for example, in the decision in the original post, there was only one faculty at a very large institution who wanted to use the feature Moodle lost on). But they really really wanted the feature and they were tenured (and the CIO was not) so that desire carried alot of weight.
Also ironically they ended up paying more than 3 times the price for D2L and for the amount more they paid (hundreds of 1000s of $ more) it would have been easy enough to build the feature and contribute it to core)*.
So all that said, feature counts are very important in the US market due to the nature of the US RFP process, and if an application wants to win consistantly in this environment it needs to be able to compete on feature counts. That and a slick interface will get you the quarter million USD/year contracts Blackboard is still bleeding, if you want those.
