It has been approximately twenty years since the initial germination of numerical continuation as an approach to finding solution points of systems of polynomial equations and ten years since its flowering into numerical algebraic geometry, which facilitates description of solution sets of any dimension and operations on these, such as intersection and fiber products. We will attempt to step back from the torrent of recent developments to sketch out the big picture of what a general software package for numerical algebraic geometry should be: what core functions are necessary, how these can be organized into higher level algorithms, and how this might be wedded to user interfaces that allow access by non-experts while still being open to new advances in algorithms.