Lee, this is pretty bad, but in my experience the gummint doesn't have the corner on this market. There are plenty of goofy error messages out there. At least this isn't a Java stack trace -- those are worse.

And there are plenty of folk doing better and tryin' to do better. But I'm afraid that we, and include myself here, are willing to put up with this, or work around it, or ... just give up. All of the user experience, assistance, centered design, etc., requires participation by all the actors. It takes two to tango and more than two to make human computer interaction work.