As a Drupal dev of several years, my team recently started working on a rebuild of our sites (magazines/blogs) in a custom node.js framework. I appreciate cert

As a Drupal dev of several years, my team recently started working on a rebuild of our sites (magazines/blogs) in a custom node.js framework. I appreciate certain notions embedded in Drupal, still: abstracting away technical requirements, flexible data models (content types), huge number of pre-existing modules that cover a tremendous range of cases. Still I found the modules mostly served as guides to create our own custom solutions, and less as plug-in-play options. I was really able to build some good functionality, abstract enough for the core elements to be shared between 6 websites, with superficial theme-level changes for each. That said, anything awesomely written performed so abysmally that the great work really felt like it was a waste in the end. In that sense, Drupal strikes me as a true dead-end. The basic heart of the app, and elements of the philosophy make a beast that is bad for anybody with skill who wants to feel good about what they've done. Other criticisms would be the excessive integration of administrative-type functionality with end-user functionality; an almost incomprehensible (Fields) system for building custom data extensions; and the big one for so many here, the tight-coupling of the database with the code everywhere, which is part of what makes it so slow and a nightmare to develop with. As to job security; I suppose I have that, and I often get offers to work on Drupal projects beside my main employment, but I find the work so lacking in joy that I need to charge punitive hourly rates. For a certain type of project I'd definitely choose Drupal over Wordpress. Still, I wish there was some middle-ground. A more performant CMS, ready-to-go for small-to-medium size vanity or content projects, that doesn't make the insane compromises Drupal does to be "user-friendly" (read: code-averse).