Hi,
I'm a great fan of SCCP; I've used many shopping cart apps and CMS extensions and for ease of use SCCP beats them all by a mile.

BUT........I understand that ease of use comes at a price; i.e. that we're always gonna be limited by how flexible the app is, so I get the fact that there will be limitations in how much control we have over the site design and functionality.

The easy way to extend this would be to mash the SCCP site inside another site. I have for example, used an iframe window in a parent site to point to the SCCP pages. This is easy to do BUT I can't get rid of the SCCP menu and this ruins the whole effect.
Can we please have a way of switching the menu off in the next release?

Thanks.

If you put the entire cart into an iframe, all subsequent pages open in that iframe unless the link specifies top or accomplish this by other means. So does PayPal also open in the iframe when you check out?

Yes it does, but this doesn't seem to present a problem; all functionality seems to work just fine, from browsing to checkout. Both "sites" are in the same domain, I've just stuffed the SCCP files in a subdirectory under the main site.
Obviously I have had to build a menu on the parent site that links to all the shop pages and makes them all appear in the iframe. I used the most vanilla SCCP template I could build, the only problem is that the SCCP menu appearing inside the iframe ruins the whole effect.
It did occur to me to try and edit the SCCP files directly but (a) I'm not clever enough and (b) I'd have to do this very time I added a new product.

Oh, you do need to use breadcrumbs though, otherwise navigation is a problem

Obviously what I'd really prefer is tighter integration between Visual Site Designer and SCCP so I can build a comprehensive site with a consistent look and feel, but I appreciate that's a bit more of a long term aspiration.

It would probably be easier and cheaper to just rebuild your main site around the cart using one of the VSD matching templates, or create the entire site using additional pages withing the cart. Then you are free from future consulting payments, as they arise.

Like you said, canned software is convenient but sometime restrictive in nature, and workarounds are cumbersome and have a duct tape appearance.

Duct tape can look good some times and bad others.
http://octanecreative.com/ducttape/fashion/parsons/index.html