I completely disagree with your views about Drupal development. We've recently migrated bmj.com (a big site with gets 1.6 million visitors and 6.8 million page views a month) from old Java Servlet based platform to Drupal. We've used continuous development process where up to 4 developers were working on the same code base in dev, staging/testing and prod environments. It is now a standard Drupal development practice to export all configuration data to the source code. BMJ.com is not a simple site, it has an article page with quite complex data structure with up to 60 meta data elements (author details, publication date, vol/issue number, section, series, category, taxonomy, relations to other articles, open access flag, etc...) being rendered at the relevant blocks. The business and editorial departments have been happy with the new opportunities Drupal is offering them. For more detail, please access Drupal success case study: http://drupal.org/node/1557636
This does not say much about Drupal being good in absolute terms. It only tells us the obvious point that Drupal is a lot better then your old application.
What you state would have been just as trough had you developed in Rails, Django, and maybe even in PHPnuke. What you don't state, is why Drupal was the better fit compared to modern alternatives. Is it?
