That's true, and we certainly want custom RDD developers and the like to be able to access runJob etc.  My question, though, is whether we really want all users of, e.g., spark-shell to be able to call runJob, submitJob, etc. directly.  It's something of a question of whether spark-shell is targeted at developers (who want to be able to do anything in the repl that they could in standalone code), or whether it is targeted at end users who just want/need to be able to do the kinds of higher-level things with RDDs that we typically show in examples.  Maybe the issue isn't so much that, within SparkContext itself, there needs to be another access level for methods as it is that we could use another kind of interactive tool/UI (something like iPython Notebooks, perhaps...) that doesn't have full access to all the SparkContext methods that many users shouldn't really be messing with directly.