[SwellJoe]

And, yet, the results for users are stunningly great. I heavily use both WordPress and Drupal for sites. WordPress may be uglier on the backend, but to people just using the software, the differences could not be more stark, and Drupal does not fare well.

Things like upgrading the core software...with WordPress it's so easy that it doesn't even take thought; hell, they've made upgrades automatic by default a few days ago. With Drupal, I'm months into a migration process to get our site onto Drupal 7 (not even kidding). It's been more complicated, and more error-prone, than the process of migrating from OpenACS to Joomla and then from Joomla into Drupal 6.

WordPress also seems to have the ecosystem right. No matter what kind of task you're trying to solve, there are a dozen plugins for it, some free, some commercial, some a hybrid of the two (sometimes annoyingly spammy about it). I've whipped up several websites in the past few weeks for various side projects I have, and it's downright fun to build complicated sites with WordPress. And, because there are more themes than there are people using WordPress (exaggeration to make a point), getting a site looking good and not like every other WordPress site is trivial and cheap. I find myself wanting to make new websites because it's more fun than working on my company website running Drupal. When it comes to building custom code, I prefer Drupal (mostly), but I do that pretty rarely; I interact with the frontend and admin interface daily.

I've almost talked myself into migrating my company site to WordPress+bbPress. I wonder if there's a really good ticket tracker option for WordPress...

[mtbcoder]

"No matter what kind of task you're trying to solve, there are a dozen plugins for it, some free, some commercial, some a hybrid of the two (sometimes annoyingly spammy about it)."

This is a double-edged sword that can get you into trouble quickly. Personally, I prefer systems that focus on one thing and one thing only.

[SwellJoe]

But, I need more than one thing on my websites. Sure, you can have many disparate parts all doing their one thing well ..but the user experience for that often sucks. Controlling notifications from four different tools in four different places is deeply user hostile, for example, and that's the situation I'd be putting my users in for our website (unless I built a unified notification UI for forums, content, tickets, and store applications). Likewise unifying logins/sessions is often a nightmare (I've done it but don't like doing it). Handling spam across multiple tools that allow user content, etc. There are big costs to single-purpose tools. For some folks the cost is worth paying.