Why is MIME hard?

[Girish Kulkarni <geeree@gmail.com>]

I know this has been asked here many times before, but I'd be glad if
someone explains in a less esoteric manner.

I recently started reading my mail in Emacs and tried VM in XEmacs
21.4 and Rmail in GNU Emacs 21.1.1. While I have settled on Rmail for
last couple of weeks I found that the lack of MIME support was
bothering me.

 0. How can I receive messages with MIME? (Attachments, HTML
messages, ...)
 1. How can I send messages with MIME? (basically attachments)

The oft-quoted page http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/~trey/emacs/mime.html
seems to have stopped existing and I have been through the Emacs MIME
manual. But the real reason for posting this here is my inability to
guess a philosophy behind making MIME so hard in Emacs. Can't it be
any simpler? Also, someone commented on comp.mail.mime that I had to
"let go of Rmail and use Gnus or Mew instead" if I wanted MIME. Is
that really so?

--
Girish Kulkarni - Allahabad, India - http://girish.50webs.com