[WimLeers]

Indeed.

Drupal 8 does exactly this. Use Drupal 8 for data modeling and storing the data. Use its forms if you want to. Retrieve the data using GraphQL and do all the rendering yourself. It even is capable of a hybrid model, where it serves pages BigPipe-style, and you do client-side rendering for the most dynamic/interactive parts.

See http://buytaert.net/the-future-of-decoupled-drupal.

[zappo2938]

Drupal 8 is going to be huge. Although, I'm doing Angular + Node now, I'm very excited and anticipating using it in conjunction with React, Angular, Node, and Solr.

[mercer]

I left the Drupal world right before Drupal 7 was introduced. While there were many reasons for this, the speed and insane db structure (and resulting queries) were a big cause of my switch. Another big issue was the fact that while Drush and the Features module made it easier to avoid having to click around in the admin interface, I still had to configure too much through the Drupal back-end UI (with much of this configuration stored in the db, which I understand in context but still really hate).

Have these issues been resolved in later versions? Because there was a lot about Drupal that I did like.

[WimLeers]

Yes, you could consider Drupal 8 basically a rewrite.

Massive modernization. Most high-level concepts remain the same. The implementation became much better. And it's a joy instead of a pain to extend/customize.

I recommend you to take a look :) See https://www.drupal.org/drupal-8.0 — RC1 was tagged _yesterday_.

It sounds like you will particularly like the Configuration System. See https://www.chapterthree.com/blog/principles-configuration-m...

[mercer]

That sounds great! I'll definitely look into it, as I still get many requests for Drupal developers.