[dasil003]

It's actually quite simple, I'm not interested in working on low-budget sites that need a ton of functionality for a very low price tag. There's a huge market for these types of sites, and Drupal and other CMSes are often the only remotely feasible option for these clients.

The thing is that I am an end-to-end web developer with 15 years experience with the full stack from back end, DB technology, server side languages, Javascript, HTML, CSS, Usability, etc. I have a very precise idea of what I want, and how to build it. With something like Drupal, you're only using 2-15% of the architecture for any given project, but yet the rest of it imposes assumptions and constraints which end up being performance and conceptual overhead. You can get a lot of mileage out of it, but you're constantly thinking in terms of the Drupal framework. This manifests in terms of lots of little compromises. I much prefer to build the app up from a basic set of web building blocks such as is provided by frameworks like Rails or Django. This typically costs more, but enables a much more polished product in terms of design, performance, and extensibility.