Most of my freelance work has been "saving" fairly new WordPress sites that just haven't worked out for clients. I think you're absolutely spot on when you say

Most of my freelance work has been "saving" fairly new WordPress sites that just haven't worked out for clients. I think you're absolutely spot on when you say that it's mostly people who haven't seen any better. There seems to be a real cult behind the use of WordPress as a CMS, and after working with some of the developers that have delivered the first WP sites nearly every single one of them seems sold on WordPress being the only tool required to rapidly build a website. As a tool, WordPress does work, but the plugin-driven development nature of WordPress leads to some horrendous problems, ones that were solved years ago on other platforms. It also tends to attract a large number of poor developers. More often than not, I use Umbraco for sites that need a CMS, or Django when the site has been hacked to handle an application, almost effectively scrapping most of the existing code, and the clients are always happy and have a much faster website.