if you're code illiterate... why do you care whether the code is open source or not? not to disparage your question I'm just curious... IMHO trading systems pretty much by definition require some understanding of coding or logic processes. it's pretty minimal though, you don't need to understand much just basic if/then and for loops (although objects and events are nice). http://wealth-lab.com has a GUI interface for systems development, basically you can drag and drop indicators and drag and drop logic branches (and/or/etc)... basically the same as coding but a little less typing. not open source though.
Does anyone out there know how the latency on executions with any of these platforms compares to OpenQuant or NinjaTrader?
RightEdge has drag and drop. Here is a video of the drag and drop. I have never used them so I can't comment on how good the software is. http://www.rightedgesystems.com/DemoVideos.aspx
open quant and ninja are both .NET platforms written in c#, so at least their theoretical minimum latency should be comparable. in practice I don't know of any studies on this, that's a good question. any study would undoubtably vary a lot on the decision making process and the inicators of your the system under study, but seems like a worthwhile project. couldn't find any in quick online search.
Your question doesn't make much sense as you must implement your own strategy to make money. You can use jsystemtrader as is, but the canned strategies all lose money.
Unless I am misunderstanding you, what you are calling strategy self-optimization is basically the same thing as walk-forward optimization. So you might want to look for that as a feature. I'm a developer on RightEdge and candidly we don't have support for this yet either. We are hoping to be able to support it in the next edition.
fyi I just open-sourced the broker connectors to tradelink. So now you can use tradelink to auto-trade IB and Assent in addition to the simulation support, all in the box and open source. http://tradelink.googlecode.com