There are many things I disagree with in your comment. Firstly, TechCrunch is not primarily about the TechCrunch community. It's unlike Hacker News in that way

There are many things I disagree with in your comment. Firstly, TechCrunch is not primarily about the TechCrunch community. It's unlike Hacker News in that way. Hacker News exists to talk about interesting articles; TechCrunch is a newspaper - it exists to write them. So for them, commenting is a commodity. Secondly, I think your views on CMSs are a very bad strategy (a classic case of "not invented here" syndrome, which is bad). They're also wrong - I don't think CMSs looks are generic at all. At least not with a decent CMS, which you can theme. Wordpress, for example, can be made to look completely different from one site to the next. Lastly, I think you're missing the obvious tradeoff involved. Sure, you're more limited by creating a site using a CMS, but then it's also a lot harder.