1) Drupal's great if you can accept something close to what you want - that has most (but not all) of what you want, plus some stuff that you didn't need. But

1) Drupal's great if you can accept something close to what you want - that has most (but not all) of what you want, plus some stuff that you didn't need. But if you're dealing with perfectionists who want things precisely their way, then you'll spend a lot of time and add a lot of complexity overriding, suppressing, and customizing things and gluing clusters of modules together. Sometimes more than if you'd just built what you needed from scratch. 2) Initial standup can be very quick and easy, especially if you can do it with mostly out-of-the-box stuff (see 1). But over the long-term maintenance and development can be extremely difficult. 3) If you're stuck using designs from designers who aren't skilled with Drupal, theming is likely to be inordinately difficult. Drupal provides a great amount of useful tools and utilities to designers, but if the designer doesn't use them then you basically have to rip them all out and/or override them all and the theme can grow monstrous. 4) The ability for a 'non-technical' user to do so much through the admin interface is a great strength. But the fact that there is so much there in the admin interface (scattered around by the different modules) means that non-technical users often can't (or won't) use it without a thorough understanding of Drupal and the modules. It's too complicated. So you'll need to add time to strip out, simplify, and rework the admin interface. Even then, you may still end up with programmers being tasked with content edits. 5) The database for config+content really is a big issue that majorly affects long-term maintenance and continuing development/deployment on a live site. 'Features' and exportables are not a good enough fix. They're better than nothing, but don't rely too heavily on them. They break down in a lot of cases. D8 promises to be better on that issue...we'll see. 6) Performance really is a problem. For any moderately complex and trafficked site, you have to set up proxies and elaborate caching and etc. etc. just to get "okay, I suppose that's acceptable enough" performance. It can be done, but it's a major headache. That's a tradeoff for the flexibility and modularity. I've built scores of sites in Drupal over the years, and it's a great tool, but it's far from perfect. It's all about tradeoffs, and often the greatest strengths are also the greatest weaknesses. You just have to decide whether it fits what you need. If you can live with the drawbacks, then it's good. If not, then you'll need something else which will have it's own different set of drawbacks.