[rjknight]

"Hundreds per user request" is just wrong. Generally, Drupal opens a single connection per request (and does not use any kind of connection pooling). Perhaps you mean that Drupal issues hundreds of queries per connection? (Which is definitely much closer to the truth).

[drawkbox]

Yes I was going overboard but indeed it is truly hundreds of queries and sometimes numerous connections per user.

Some sites I have had to deal with on initial inspection have 250+ queries per user (sometimes the same ones over and over due to plugins/modules) and people wonder why after 10 users it breaks the database/site.

Without cache on wordpress you might be in trouble, without cache on Drupal you don't run.

Still, Drupal is orders of magnitude more useable than other PHP frameworks like Joomla. The PHP that is fun is using microframeworks like limonade, flight etc if PHP is used.