I would like to discuss with you a special case of requirements management. I call it “requirements management for mere mortals”. 

I had worked as a project manager in a small web development company. 
Significant part of my daily job was talking with our clients to 
translate their wishes into the tasks for our developers. 

The problem I faced is that most of the approaches and tools I used 
previously simply did not fit. 

The root cause is that I had to work with 
completely non-techie stakeholders who do not care about *requirements*. 
They have *wishes* and tend to change their mind several times a day. 
On the other hand the process of requirements gathering has 
has to be fast and accurate.

While I adapted to such constraints in general there is an issue that I did not manage 
to overcome – software. It seems that there is no such thing as 
“RQ management software for mere mortals”. 

There are tools like DOORS, Polarion and ton of other RQ systems targeted to 
enterprise (read terribly expensive and complicated) but there is nothing for a small business. 

Here is a list of my wishes for a simple RQ management system: 

 - Web interface
 - Each RQ is a separate entity with unique ID
 - Each RQ is versioned (I should be able to see who changed what)
 - RQs have tags for easy navigation/grouping
 - A list of RQs (current state of RQ document) can be tagged/baselined
 - Instant full-text search through all versions
 - Primitive access control (as simple as “read/write” permissions)
 - Built-in comments/chat to quickly discuss RQs in context
 - Simple markup language support like Markdown instead of bloated rich text editor. 
 - Integration with email (i.e. I can discuss RQ via email but the message will be imported/stored in the system)
 - Export of RQ document to the PDF or other commonly used format
 - There should be no *traceability* or other features that regular user has no idea about. Basic links (i.e. "related RQs") between RQs would be enough.
 - Extremely minimalistic and straightforward UI so any user familiar with GMail will be able to use/understand it from the first sight. 

To summarize, I want something like Basecamp but targeted exclusively to requirements 
gathering process from regular people (read non-geeks). 

Did some of you experience the problem described above? 
Do you find yourself in a need of such software or you are perfectly fine with MS Word/Excel?