I wouldn't necessarily take client praise as a testament to being good or bad. When I started out I was pushing WP sites; I usually gauged things by complaints

I wouldn't necessarily take client praise as a testament to being good or bad. When I started out I was pushing WP sites; I usually gauged things by complaints (very similar vibe to when I was working on cars). I have had very few calls / emails about complaints with the WP admin area, though I do/did generally drop them into a less privileged account with less flashy buttons to break things with, as well as set their dashboard up with some notes about how to accomplish tasks specific to their usage (how to post / edit / delete, how to clear the cache manually if they had to, etc). I might be in the minority there, and I feel like that contributed a bit to the no-complaints thing... but even a vanilla WP admin area is very usable.