"It's "success" is only because it's community consists of people who don't know any better."
That is both untrue and dishonest. Drupal's success is directly attributable to all of the following:
1. a very large, growing, and passionate pool of contributing developers and designers.
2. aggressive community involvement a la issue queues, forums, IRC, local user's groups and 30+ regional camps and conferences in North America alone.
3. Did you read the part where the op wrote about the ridiculous amount of shit you can get done without opening a text editor? Office staff with minimal technical background can be trained to implement/manage most of it.
4. It. Just. Works. On commodity hosting no less. Or on expensive enterprise hosting. With little or no assing around with server configuration. There are hosts that have push-button site installation.
In short, Drupal is popular for all of the same reasons that PHP still hasn't gone away after almost a decade of developers whinging that it sucks.
Is it fun to code for? Nope, not even a little bit. By the time you've written your fourth or fifth custom module 99% of it is the same tired slog through boilerplate code and hook_$N_alter() groveling. Dull, dull, dull shit. And yet I suspect Drupal and Wordpress (which is arguably even worse to deal with) are running way more websites than django, rails, and symphony put together. Look on the bright side, at least it wasn't written in Perl. :)
1. Growing by what measure? When I was at Drupalcon 2012 there was a large amount of discussion about how the community wasn't growing and was the same people every year. And I seriously don't mean to be a dick, but passion doesn't equal technical competence. You don't have to be a gifted programmer to understand quality, and understand that Drupal lacks it.
2. There are user groups, I've been to them. They're mostly full of people who have basic problems and a few exasperated and grizzly veterans who offer arcane solutions to non-arcane problems "use last night's dev version of the module, sure it's ok to put php in the database... And the community of drupal.org might exist, but if you can sort it out from the convoluted UX mess that is drupal.org, good luck.
3. Is that supposed to be a feature? In theory, you can get ridiculous amounts of things done if you happen to know the arcane way to combine 30 different checkboxes and twelve different modules. How is this by any objective measure better than writing code? Code is expressive, documentable, concise. Checkboxes and UI interactions are not.
4. This is hardly a unique feature. The same can be said about wordpress, rails, django, etc (at least if you use webfaction)
I don't think you can argue under any objective measure that wordpress is more difficult to deal with than drupal. It has many of the same issues as drupal (feature management), but the ease of theming and documentation are lightyears ahead. It's also quite a bit more limited.
1. Site adoption rates, especially in the enterprise space. You're absolutely right, the developer community isn't growing, and I think the blame for that lies squarely with the core codebase's deathmarch towards becoming Sharepoint. There was a point in time (circa D5, early D6) when coding with Drupal was still kinda fun. Core architecture didn't get in the way as much.
2. There are user groups, I've organized two of them. They are frequently full of people who have basic problems and a few exasperated and grizzly veterans who offer arcane solutions to non-arcane problems. Best outcomes typically occur when one or more local dev shops get involved with the group and use community support as a way to build their brand. Anecdotally this describes most tech user groups.
3. Yes, this is a feature. It's objectively better because you are not writing code.
In addition to the obvious benefits (no fucking code) this puts the task at hand (at least theoretically) within the reach of non-technical or semi-technical individuals.
4. I dislike Drupal's internals for diverse and varied reasons I will not go into here. I dislike Wordpress's internals for many of the same reasons, and Wordpress is substantially more limited in it's capabilities than Drupal. Same general set of problems, many fewer features.
Also, I agree Drupal's documentation sucks hard. Unfortunately there's nothing to be done about it. It would take close to 10,000 man-hours to write shitty, blatantly misinformed documentation for the current body of contributed modules, assuming you budgeted 30 minutes to examine the module and 30 minutes to write about it.
That is both untrue and dishonest. Drupal's success is directly attributable to all of the following:
1. a very large, growing, and passionate pool of contributing developers and designers.
2. aggressive community involvement a la issue queues, forums, IRC, local user's groups and 30+ regional camps and conferences in North America alone.
3. Did you read the part where the op wrote about the ridiculous amount of shit you can get done without opening a text editor? Office staff with minimal technical background can be trained to implement/manage most of it.
4. It. Just. Works. On commodity hosting no less. Or on expensive enterprise hosting. With little or no assing around with server configuration. There are hosts that have push-button site installation.
In short, Drupal is popular for all of the same reasons that PHP still hasn't gone away after almost a decade of developers whinging that it sucks.
Is it fun to code for? Nope, not even a little bit. By the time you've written your fourth or fifth custom module 99% of it is the same tired slog through boilerplate code and hook_$N_alter() groveling. Dull, dull, dull shit. And yet I suspect Drupal and Wordpress (which is arguably even worse to deal with) are running way more websites than django, rails, and symphony put together. Look on the bright side, at least it wasn't written in Perl. :)