I'm pretty sure the intent of my statement was quite clear, there is no NEED for Ripple's "medium" of transferring wealth from one type to another when I can just go to a currency exchange and achieve the exact same goal without needing to use Ripple's convoluted web of trust.
There is always a need for more competition in the exchange space.
It is not hard to wrap my head around, it is just entirely unnecessary unless you WANT to trade on IOU's in which case you are most likely either someone who has nothing of value to trade or you're a scammer with multiple accounts who builds up a decent web of trust until it reaches a target amount, then you trade on as many IOU's as you can which you then never pay back. That account is then no longer trusted and you move onto the next account you've been building up trust on, rinse and repeat...
You are not understanding thou, if a gateway holds on to the funds for the exchange, then how can the user scam another user? Unless the whole gateway is untrusted, in which case people can not use it, and the web of trust wouldn't really exist. You didn't really understand my point but I think if you did a little more reading on ripple you get it. It took me a little less time than to understand than bitcoins, but still a lot of time.