“A wakeup call for the Drupal community”

Freeman recently wrote A wakeup call for the Drupal community and I wish I could have put the failings of the Drupal CMS as well as he has:

This is a common theme in the community. You can kludge your way to victory with just about any feature set you can think of if (and only if) you write enough hook_$n_alter() code, can find some contrib modules to pick up the slack, and have a designer who can code php tucked in your back pocket

Freeman’s states that the reason Drupal failed to win CMS of the year over WordPress is because WordPress is simply easier to use.

What I believe is called for here (and installation profiles are definitely on the right track) are larger full-feature modules that implement 100% of a common feature (forums, image galleries) with no requirement to install a bunch of add-ons.

Yes and yes. Drupal has gotten too scattered in its feature set and forgotten what people actually use it for. Image galleries, WYSIWYG editors, forums, profiles — make these part of the core system, or such that developers don’t need three and four modules working together just to do one thing.

UPDATE! Case in point: my WordPress database has 10 tables. Drupal? 116. Yes, it does more, but eleven times more?