[robador]

I've was a Drupal developer for about 15 years, then moved into management, eventually changed to a company that works with a 'modern' stack. I really miss Drupal.

When I started out my career I basically was a one man web design agency, tailoring to small local businesses. When looking for a CMS I quickly found that Drupal allowed me the ease and flexibility to configure and customize websites for my customers. It was a perfect fit for me because I had enough skills to install and host sites, and to customize those things with code that I couldn't find a ready made module for.

Over time Drupal changed a lot, and my skills grew. My focus shifted more and more to the technical side. As Drupal became more professional, so did I, and with it, the customers became a lot bigger too.

I started to manage a team of developers, and then multiple. Finally I made a move to a big Corp in which Drupal was not used. I like the people that I work with a lot, all extremely capable and talented people. But I feel we're constantly reinventing the wheel. Things that I feel have long been solved in Drupal are somewhat half-assed due to the chosen tech stack and the time constraints. Drupal may not be perfect, but it did have an evolution of more than 20 years, and that shows. A very strong entity system, fields, taxonomy, user management, roles/permissions, i18n, asset handling (media), slugs, redirects, breadcrumbs, workflows, revisions, and perhaps the cherry on top: JsonApi (a porcelain if you ask me). A strong community and reasonable documentation means that it's possible to switch vendors, as everybody works with the same API's (mileage may vary a bit).

The situation now with where I'm at couldn't be further from that. Everything JavaScript and microservices based, build on a (imho) dreadful SaaS 'CMS' (Contentful). The so called 'enterprise' CMS is severely lacking, it's a usability a nightmare, I can't stress how bad it is. It's basically a glorified database, which means that everything else needed is being built completely from scratch. That simply doesn't compete with the 20+ years of evolution Drupal has had.

So yeah, I miss Drupal.

[solardev]

I think that's a great point: that Drupal gave you a whole car, while today's JS gives you five incompatible wheels, thirteen colors of duct tape, and three fragile shells to put over them. Drupal had a lot of really strong (as in idiomatic and enforced) patterns that didn't let you take dirty shortcuts. As much as I hated it, it was solid engineering. (I'd consider it overengineered, but that's only cuz I'm coming from the opposite extreme... Frontpage and Dreamweaver).

That was probably also its downfall. It had a huge learning curve (same as Angular's downfall). And it didn't make for easy division of labor, and there was no quick and dirty way to do anything. The reason why there are so many Drupal consultants is because it takes so much manpower and brainspace to understand how Drupal is architected. With a headless CMS, the schema admin, the content editors, and frontend devs could each do their jobs independently without stepping on everyone else's toes. It's not as complete as a majestic monolith but each person's job was a lot easier, and way more isolated and safe.

Drupal tried to be everything for everyone, and in the end it was just too much for any one normal person. It's what happens when engineers design products for people who aren't like them.