What my posts came down to in the other thread was basically that I would love to use Travel agents and preferred partners if they can provide a seamless experience. With regard to virtuoso this was specifically a fully working hotel search engine.

I know that super small two-man businesses (an acquaintance that provides mountain bike package tours in this example) can very smoothly provide hotel catalogues closely matching that of orbitz/expedia with custom filters. So I don't see why a very professional outfit like Virtuoso can't get this up. I can remember two times that I went on to their old website intent to book through them but got flustered just setting up the searches only to get the response to contact an agent for rates and specifics on rooms.