This is a very nice blog post written by Nathan Brixius here. He compares the persons who build solvers to shipbuilder, people who write models to sailors and the end user of applications to passengers. The problem with CP is that the boat is so difficult to sail that to be a good sailor, you also need to have a very good knowledge in shipbuilding so I'm not sure the comparison holds for CP.
My opinions is that CP is probably more like a formula one. Very cool, very fast but .... don't tell me that Michael Schumacher doesn't know anything about the internals of his car (the only problem is that there is no place for passengers in a formula one ;-)).
