[MilStdJunkie]

My feelings are probably dated. Back when Drush was first a thing, it needed su for some of its tricks, which was . . well, back in the pre-containerization days . . insane. There were a LOT of emergency updates we had to do purely to keep Drush running and safe.

Speaking more broadly, Drupal was also seen less as a "framework" and more of a straight "CMS", so the idea of a CMS needing a CLI was, then, a bit of a "Huh?". CMSs were regarded, at the time, as the thing you set up so the secretaries and executive assistants could update the website. Of course, in the decade and a half since then, we've seen how CMSs inevitably grow into pseudo-frameworks.

We also have a better grasp, today, on just how complicated the functionality of a CMS actually is, laying as it does across the intersection of natural and formal languages. A linguistics specialist could have predicted this, or even a dedicated data scientist, but the content world is shockingly bereft of linguistic specialists among its spec writers and practitioners. DITA - to abuse one single example - arose almost entirely from pedagogical academics, with no input from linguistics, computational or otherwise. And DITA is actually kinda-sorta planned. The various MIL-STD content specifications - 48 and counting, not including the bespoke USN things - don't arise from anything, they're just eternal flypaper for whatever contract items get thrown at them, plus golden gimmes from the blessed vendors.

[eaton]

FWIW, the "Drupal should be a framework" vs "Drupal should be a web page management tool" issue wasn't a matter of ignorance in the community as much it was a point of contention — there were fairly high-profile talks at Drupalcon as early as 2011 hitting on that very issue, and some of the linguistics stuff you mention was coming up in core conversations not much later than that. (Source: Was the crazy guy ranting about content-as-a-languagelike-system-of-communication in many of those conversations. Whew, DITA. Memories.)

The challenge, I think, is that by that point in time Drupal had gone through its first big popularity explosion, and was starting to grapple with the competing interests of many different audiences. Acquia ended up being instrumental in steering it towards "enterprise sites with complicated UGC requirements," but for quite some time the open source ideal of "the project reflects the priorities of the people who contribute time to it" meant it lacked a strong, opinionated take on many of the things you mention.

For many years Drupal's strength was (IMO) that enough of _those folks_ existed in the community to ensure you could build complex, highly adaptable structured content systems with it... and enough of _those other folks_ existed in the community to ensure that there were click-together content display and delivery tools that worked with the complex content. If you approached it with a clear understanding of where some of those boundaries were, you could build really amazing things — but if you came in looking for a well-paved path to build a simple site or architect a complex one, well... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

edit -- clicked on your profile and read some of your posts in other threads, and I feel like I should just get a beer and commiserate with you about doomed CCS initiatives for a few hours. I salute you.