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wardick: it's not that XOOPS doesn't fit the world, but that part of the world is taking advantage of that world's (and not just XOOPS's) loopholes.
Not having any data written to any phisical file is the only solution that fits your definition of the world, and that is the exact description of a static set of HTML pages. XOOPS is a dynamic content management system, so the concept alone means that data needs to be stored and retieved from files (getting them from the database is sooo much slower -it's why we have caching). And for that, the folder needs to be writable by the system. And that last part is where the XOOPS involvement ends.
Now, for a folder to be writable by a php script running on the server, the folder needs to be owned by the user that is running the script. As Mithy explained very clearly, the one running the script isn't always the same one who uploaded (and therefore owns) it. This is simply a fact of server and account management, and has nothing whatsoever to do with XOOPS. Some (most?) hosts have shared user accounts on a server, but is running a single Apache webserver. That saves a lot of system resources, but means that the apache server runs as a different user then the owner of the scripts. In most cases it's 'nobody'. However, in order for scripts to be able to write to a folder, the user 'nobody' needs to be able to write, and that means world writable (as nobody does not own the script files).
So, it's more an issue of the world being imperfect and flawed, and every script that writes somehting to a file has this same problem. And not an issue of XOOPS not fitting into the world, because then you'd put a ban on all php and asp and cmf and dynamic scripting languages that are interpreted.
Herko