Hey, I'm a guy who has done projects in several other PHP frameworks (Joomal, Drupal, Zend/Magento/aMember, cake, EE, CI) as well as some work in python/django

Hey, I'm a guy who has done projects in several other PHP frameworks (Joomal, Drupal, Zend/Magento/aMember, cake, EE, CI) as well as some work in python/django and who tries, each quarter or so, to at least play with some other languages and frameworks (I've done the rails book tutorials, and tutorials with several of the JS MV-ish frameworks). If you're working with one of the larger WP-oriented managed hosts, we have the same clients and I have likely worked with your hosting. So, well, here I am, nice to meet you :). I agree... most people doing this kind of work don't have a lot of other options to choose from-- it is just what they know. They certainly neither know nor care to learn some other framework. Many of the people in this line of work are selling low or mid end projects to smallish businesses premised on leveraging functionality built by the large WP community. That said, even though I could do projects in other systems: I am usually working with agencies/consultancies who _want_ WP because, it is super easy to find folks who can work with WP on some level, their clients are familiar with WP, and it is trivial to meet a bunch of marketing or CMS goals with it. So while WP doesn't "suck the least" (I know of stuff I like better), it's still a good tool for a lot of reasons that have little to do with the code. For marketing objectives, you're going to have a hard time finding something objectively better for the total cost of ownership (there are, of course, better eCommerce, community forum, and application systems). And your position self-selects for a particular kind of client... you're probably not seeing the folks who are doing the $10K-100K projects I see, in which the server management isn't farmed out to a hosting company.