Agreed. I remember back then thinking what the fuss was all about. There already was Gopher and FTP, and connecting these two occurred at least in my mind back then, so it should have been trivial to most people :)

The important thing for it to succeed was to have a large enough group of people using the same standards. That was probably a (very) hard thing to accomplish, and perhaps Berners-Lee played a large role in that?