PHP/Symfony/Drupal and everything is else bananas because of EOL. You are dealing with a stack where every 2 years one subsystem goes EOL. Drupal 6 & 7 have l

PHP/Symfony/Drupal and everything is else bananas because of EOL. You are dealing with a stack where every 2 years one subsystem goes EOL. Drupal 6 & 7 have lasted that long because Drupal didn't have to depend on anything except PHP. Build on a set of always EOL'd subsystems and you get developer burn out, endless budget requests and justifications for maintenance, upgrades, endless obsolescence etc. Drupal has failed primarily because lack of leadership. Drupal has always been its community, and with so many contributors switching the community to a different language would not have been difficult. The underlying model and the fit for the language is all that would have mattered. In the early days of PHP one Buytaert (not Dries) said Drupal should be switched to LISP, and given how stable LISP has been over the years it wasn't that farfetched. If so many people can learn Autocad and Microsoft Excel and Office Basic, then so many people could also switch to LISP. Personally I would go for Smalltalk. The main power of Drupal is that it was always like Excel formulas -> Word/Excel Macros -> Office VBA -> Access -> C#/SQL Server/.NET. It served a whole load of users of varying skills and it helped basic users learn and upskill. For a sheer lack of understanding or perhaps money, the leadership decided to go "enterprise" a blew up a huge majority of its users and contributors, and for most of its users it is pretty dead unless they want to try Backdrop. The focus on enterprise was a failure of leadership to understand what made Drupal as strong as it was. Users are not going launch resource heavy Dockers and VMs with command lines just to start a personal CMS. For all those people Drupal is basically a non-starter.