>> Frankly, I think that the majority of the current problems would be solved by trimming all of the fat from the core. The challenge, of course, is that every

>> Frankly, I think that the majority of the current problems would be solved by trimming all of the fat from the core. The challenge, of course, is that everyone has a different definition of "Fat" versus "Muscle." The developers who actively maintain the codebase are a tiny, tiny percentage of the overall community that uses it. Many of the features that are frustrating and annoying to maintain are popular among the non-developers who use Drupal for site building. Balancing the usage needs of those people with the maintenance woes od the developers is one of the big challenges. The other is dealing with the identity crisis you describe; the lack of willingness to focus on a manageably small set of use cases or target audiences became a real problem once Drupal's growth curve started swinging up around 2007 or 2008. Now, simply declaring that things are "more focused" will orphan large numbers of users who came on board and started doing their own thing with Drupal while it was less focused. It'sa conundrum.