[csixty4]

Drupal Core is basic enough that you can wrap your head around it in 10 minutes, but Core isn't going to give you a very useful site. So, you need to start adding in modules, often with their own incompatibilities and APIs (ctools). And then things start falling apart.

The code to create a node is simple. The code to create a node with a term reference, two field collections, and images copied from the filesystem is considerably more complicated, poorly documented, and prone to throwing weird errors.

[halefx]

The module system is actually what I was talking about. You don't need to understand every single contributed module to understand how the whole system works. I'd like to see your example of how/where Drupal "falls apart" when adding contributed modules.

If you're writing a module when you don't understand how modules work, you're gonna have a bad time. The Examples for Developers[1] module probably would have helped out. The Field example creates a custom field. The Node example create a custom node type. Or you could have just created the node type using the Field UI (and if you need it in code, export the configuration using Features[2]).

1: https://drupal.org/project/examples

2: https://drupal.org/project/features