OK, so I did start writing that LDAP server. I call it tinyldap, although it currently does not do much. However, the feedback from frustrated openldap users was overwhelming. No previous project of mine has ever created this kind of collective "Finally!" sigh from people who send me lengthy rants on why openldap is a toy not ready for production use. Well, it will be a long time until tinyldap becomes usable, but I certainly underestimated the demand for it.
On a side node, Mozilla urgently needs to support anti aliased fonts under X. My eyes hurt from these ugly fonts.