[steveivy]

(Disclaimer: I worked for Six Apart Services for 2 years)

I don't think MT has "weird perlisms", it's just... written in perl. WordPress took off around the time folks were realizing that you could build big sites in PHP, and so PHP in general was taking off (as Byrne mentions in his piece, more enterprise sites were adopting PHP as well). Perl started a slide back into "sysadmin" land as far as many developers and managers were concerned.

Static publishing is not a "quirk": it's a feature that sold MT to most of the large publishers using it. Yes, you have to make some design decisions with static publishing in mind, but I've never heard of an MT site being Fireballed, either.

[erikpukinskis]

It's also a barrier to entry. The right way to do static publishing is to have a dynamic site with a cache. Wordpress started with just a dynamic site. MT started with just a cache.

Cache-only works OK for big sites, but it's annoying for little sites. And the little sites are the big sites of tomorrow.

Wordpress's dynamic-only strategy created a huge pool of potential big customers for Wordpress, and they later tacked on caching. SixApart's cache-only strategy kept a small pool of existing big customers happy, but it was a barrier to entry, and there wasn't an easy path to the ideal "dynamic+cache" solution.