What is this document about anyway?

While I was writing this document a book "Hack Proofing Your Network" was released. I haven't been able to read it (dunno if its in print yet, and besides - everything takes a while to get to South Africa). I did however read the first chapter, as it is available to the public. In this chapter the author writes about different views on IT security - hackers, crackers, script kiddies and everything in between. I had some thoughts about this and decided that it was a good starting point for this document.
I want to simplify the issue - let us forget motives at the moment, and simply look at the different characters in this play. To do this we will look at a real world analogy. Let us assume the ultimate goal is breaking into a safe (the safe is a database, a password file, confidential records or whatever). The safe is located inside of a physical building (the computer that hosts the data). The building is located inside of a town (the computer is connected to a network). There is a path/highway leading to the town and the path connects the town to other towns and/or cities. (read Internet/Intranet). The town/city is protected by a tollgate or an inspection point (the network is protected by a firewall, screening router etc.) There might be certain residents (the police) in the town looking for suspicious activity, and reporting it to the town's mayor (the police being an IDS, reporting attacks to the sysadmin). Buildings have their own protection methods, locks chains, and access doors (on-host firewalling, TCP wrappers, usernames and passwords). The analogy can be extended to very detailed levels, but this is not the idea.
In this world there are the ones that specialize in building or safe cracking. They are not concerned with the tollgates, or the police. They are lock-picking experts - be that those of the house, or of the safe. They buy a similar safe, put it in their labs and spend months analyzing it. At the end of this period they write a report on this particular safe - they contact the manufacturer, and might even build a tool that can assist in the breaking of the safe. Maybe they don't even manage to crack into the safe - they might just provide ways to determine the type of metal the safe is made of - which might be interesting on its own. These people are the toolmakers, the Bugtraq 0-day report writers, the people that other hackers consider to be fellow hackers.
And the rest? The rest are considered to be tool users - a.k.a. script kiddies. They are portrayed as those rushing into towns, looting and throwing bricks through windows, bricks that were built by the toolmakers mentioned in the previous paragraph. They don't have any idea of the inner workings of these tools. They are portrayed as those that ring the doorbell and then runs away, just to do it a trillion times a day - those that steals liquor from the village restaurant to sell it in their own twisted village. A scary and dangerous crowd.
Is there nothing in between these groups of people? Imagine a person with a toolbox with over a thousand specialized tools in it. He knows how to use every one of these tools - what tool to use in what situation. He can make some changes to these tools - not major changes, but he can mold a tool for a specific occasion. He knows exactly where to start looking for a safe - in which town, in what building. He knows of ways to slip into the town totally undetected, with no real ID. He knows how to inspect the safe, use the correct tools, take the good stuff and be out of town before anyone detected it. He has a X-ray machine to look inside a building, yet he does not know the inner workings of the machine. He will use any means possible to get to the safe - even if it means paying bribes to the mayor and police to turn a blind eye. He has a network of friends that include tool builders, connections in "script kiddie" gangs and those that build the road to the town. He knows the fabric of the buildings, the roads, the safes and the servants inside the buildings. He is very agile and can hop from village to city to town. He has safe deposit boxes in every city and an ultra modern house at the coast. He knows ways of getting remote control surveillance devices into the very insides of security complexes, and yet he does not know the intricacies of the device itself. He knows the environment, he knows the principals of this world and everything that lives inside the world. He is not focused on one device/safe/building/tollgate but understands all the issues surrounding the objects. Such a person is not a toolmaker, neither is he a script kiddie, yet he is regarded as a Script Kiddie by those who calls themselves "hackers", and as such he has no real reason for existence.
This document is written for the in-between group of people. Toolmakers will frown upon this document and yet it may provide you with some useful insight (even if it better the tools you manufacture). It attempts to provide a methodology for hacking. It attempt to answers to "how to" question, not the "why" or the "who". It completely sidesteps the moral issue of hacking; it also does not address the issue of hackers/crackers/black hats/gray hats/white hats. It assumes that you have been in this industry long enough to be beyond the point of worrying about it. It does not try to make any excuses for hacking - it does not try to pretend that hacking is a interesting past-time. The document is written for the serious cyber criminal. All of this sounds a bit hectic and harsh. The fact of the matter is that sysadmins, security consultants, and IT managers will find this document just as interesting as cyber criminals will. Looking at your network and IT infrastructure from a different viewpoint could give you a lot of insight into REAL security issues (this point has been made over and over and over and I really don't to spend my time explaining it again [full disclosure blah blah whadda whadda wat wat]).
A note to the authors of the book "Hack proofing your network" - I truly respect the work that you have done and are doing (even though I have not read your book - I see your work every now and again). This document will go on the Internet free of charge - this document does NOT try to be a cheap imitation of what you have done, it does not in any way try to be a substitute (I am a tool user, where as you are tool writers...remember? :) )
Before we start, a few prerequisites for reading this document. Unless you want to feel a bit left in the cold you should have knowledge of the following:
1. Unix (the basics, scripting, AWK, PERL, etc.)
2. TCP/IP (routing, addressing, subnetting etc.)
3. The Internet (the services available on the 'net-e.g. DNS, FTP, HTTP, SSH, telnet etc.)
4. Experience in IT security (packetfiltering, firewalling, proxies etc.)
I have written this document over a rather long period of time. Sites and tools could be outdated by the time you read this. I wrote the document with no prior knowledge about the "targets". You will find that in many cases I make assumptions that are later found not to be true. Reading through the text will thus provide you with an un-edited view of the thought processes that I had.
Chances are very good that I am talking a load of bullshit at times - if you are a terminology expert, and I have used your pet word in the wrong context - I am really sorry - it won't ever happen again. Now please leave. In the case that I totally go off track on technical issues - please let me know. Also my English sucks, so if I loose track of the language please bear with me - I tried to write it in simple words. This is not an academic paper!!