| "It's not for developers, as it's painful to work with..." There is a learning curve, made steep by the esoteric MVC approach and initial lack of documentation. However, there is now a wealth of material available for learning and reference. Magento is opinionated as a framework and in its domain modeling. You mention your homegrown application; how easy is it for developers to spin up on your application, and how well would it satisfy & improve things as a drop-in app replacement for the hundreds of thousands of Magento instances out there? "...it's not for the end user, as the front-end experience is so-so at best, and again, hard to customise without screwing up upgradability..." Frontend experience - I'd say mostly okay, but I'll not fight you on "so-so at best". However for customizations, upgradability and obedience to DRY are the underpinning of the theming architecture. Again, lack of documentation was an issue at first (I remember duplicating the default themes for customization purposes when I first started out), but there is ample documentation now. I am most disappointed with the power given to templates, and I think this is the only legitimate gripe. "The other side of this is that a magento install will run a magento site - not ten, not two on different databases, and no mix-and-match of either, meaning that you end up with a whole bunch of code-bases, many of which differ, even if you're a shop exclusively running magento for your N clients." If this is an issue, you're doing it wrong. I would like to know more about how Magento cannot be a library for you to manage in VCS for your clients. There are SaaS offerings based on Magento, but at the point of building a SaaS you are beyond the edge of the intent/target of the problems which Magento is built to solve. "...it's definitely not for the merchant, as it's featureless, barren..." /me looks at all the routes in the admin and at the Connect marketplace... "[it's] slow, and ultimately expensive to run" Would like to know your numbers for this. Scalability is a concern, as Magento vertical and horizontal scaling are both costly. |