[mhink]

It comes down to a combination of factors, but the long and short of things when it comes to content-focused sites specifically is that companies want all of:

- A modern user experience with rich content - Authoring tools which are easy for non-technical users to understand - Fast content delivery times - Low operational costs

The problem is that getting all of them at once requires a bunch of fiddly integration problems. These problems are compounded if you throw e-commerce into the mix as well, in which case your marketing department is gonna want all kinds of analytics to try and suss out what users are doing, when, and why.

So, a lot of the weirdness and complexity has to do with making projects adaptable enough to handle a variety of different use cases while still offering at least a little bit of lift (vs. rolling the entire thing oneself).