Hi Joshua,

On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 09:47:06AM -0500, Joshua Welker wrote:
> Thank you all for the responses. I hope my original email did not come off
> as too abrasive.

No worries, I find it a fair depiction, and I share your Drupal pain.

> The issue for me is that I am having a hard time figuring out what exactly
> is the use case for Drupal. Do you want a dead-simple website? Use
> Wordpress. Do you want to add some complex custom apps? Use a framework. Do
> you want the worst of both worlds? Use Drupal.

Right. May I quote you on this? I prefer static site generators such
as Jekyll for dead-simple websites and blogs.

> If I get hit by a bus, not only will someone have
> to relearn Drupal and all its modules, but they will also have to wade
> through my spaghetti-code efforts at patching functionality into Drupal.

After I decided to leave a project where I had developed a Drupal
intranet site, my successor scrapped it and started from scratch using
Owncloud. And I do not blame him. I would have preferred using
something other than Drupal, too, but was not allowed to at the time.

(In case you wonder how Drupal and Owncloud can fit the same purpose:
The goal was to develop a Virtual Research Environment, and nobody
knows for sure what this is supposed to be, so there is room for
interpretation.)

> Right now, my framework choices are narrowed down to Ruby on Rails, Laravel
> (PHP), Django (Python), and Flask (Python). For anyone who has used these,
> do you have any insight into how maintainable your projects are and how
> easily they are managed/inherited by others?

In my new role, I inherited some Flask applications, and I find
maintaining, debugging and extending them pure joy. If you have to use
Perl instead of Python, use Dancer instead.

I also tried Django, but it I feel it forces me into a corset that is
a odd re-interpretation (or misunderstanding) of the MVC model.

Cheers,
Christian

-- 
  Christian Pietsch
  http://purl.org/net/pietsch