The Express version is designed by Microsoft to fill this hole, where a solid RDBMS engine is required but not all the extra features. I guess encouraging the use of Express also provides a certain amount of vendor-lock-in too.

I completely agree with you that, especially in the non-corporate market, MSSQL 2000 fulfills all reasonable needs. But it is the lucrative enterprise market that Microsoft, Oracle, IBM et al are trying to conquer. And in this market, there seems to be no end in sight to the new products that they can think up. Just look at the current list of Microsoft Server products - it is huge!

Andy