-can you explain why on earth you keep using this program?

If you contrast Drupal with a commercial content management system that is dead basic and easy to install and implement - e.g., MCMS (Microsoft Content Management Server) - then you can see the difference in stark relief.
I managed a project to install MCMS for a client - at a time when I knew nothing about MCMS. It all went without a hitch. I was very impressed with the product - and I do not sing Microsoft's praises very often.
See for yourself - the MCMS site is here: Powerco (New Zealand)

If you contrast Drupal with another open source CMS, then again you might see the difference in stark relief.
For example, you can see a Plone site here: Aiglon College
(IMHO that is a nice and effective website, and with pretty good ergonomics too.)

@Carol Haynes: Yes, of course, it looks great in MS IE, and (perhaps unsurprisingly?) not too brill in Firefox. It was that way when the thing was implemented in 2004, and it doesn't seem to have been changed since. I think it's probably an obscure system parameter that they (Powerco) don't know how to set, rather than a product fault. By the way, it looks even worse in Chrome!    

My comment, however, was not about the quality of the site as viewed in different browsers, but about the relative straightforwardness of the implementation - whereat it exceeded the 80-20 rule (Pareto principle) by a country mile.
Looked good for Microsoft!    

I really couldn't have cared less whether we had used MCMS, Drupal, Plone, or Disney-Goofy as a CMS otherwise. I just managed the implementation of the CMS that the client had decided to use, to meet client requirements, and from that perspective it was an impressively straightforward excercise and the client Sponsor was delighted with it. I did point out to them - several times, actually - the differences of viewing the site in different browsers, but I guess it was probably not a priority for them at the time. The CMS nevertheless made for a good and robust website and met/exceeded all client requirements.
Another happy Microsoft customer!

Now that is the great question.. and it's why even after being so angry and frustrated with drupal after i used it for my first project, i found myself using it again..

From a programmer's perspective, and under the hood -- Drupal is a remarkable achievement.  I'm just having a very hard time thinking of many use-cases where it is a good choice.

I can't really answer that in a way that would meaningfully help someone who is considering using a CMS (content management system) for their site.  because i'm not really an end user utilizing it as a CMS -- I'm using it as the foundation of a larger web service, that shares some overlap in functionality with a CMS.

Having said that, if you are really looking mainly for a CMS, i can't imagine any justification for going through the hall of configuring drupal; as impressive an achievement as it is -- it's just awful to configure -- orders of magnitude worse than anything else.  powerful yes, but a recipe for pain and disaster.

The one viable use case for Drupal is if you are a serious coder (or plan to hire one), and basically want a full CMS *and* want to add serious custom functionality on top of that CMS.  That is, if you are going to have users, forums, blogs, stories, etc. and then will add your own new kinds of complex content types -- that is the *one* use case where Drupal starts to make sense;  that's because it allows you to code independent addon modules that can do a lot of things and don't require you to modify the core Drupal code, making maintenance easier.

That's basically how i used it when i created tfdocs.com; the idea was to preserve a full cms system where users could create forms and tag them and catalog them, and do all kinds of normal CMS stuff, but also work with this new content type.  From a coding standpoint that project was more suitable to Drupal than my latest one (UQ), which is much less of a traditional CMS, and is proving to be much more painful and difficult to add the kinds of things I need to add.

One might say that I'm expecting too much from Drupal -- expecting it to be something it's not; in some sense that's a fair point -- but on the other hand, the things that i still get insanely frustrated about are some of the most obscenely straightforward things (creating sidebar links) etc.; nothing is simple in Drupal, and often the more simple it should be, the more impossibly convoluted it is to perform (and once you do figure it out you'll never remember how you did it in the future since it involved the coordination of settings in 10 different places, etc.).

You asked what I would choose as an alternative.. In the past I have piggybacked on a framework (CodeIgniter) as the starting point for a large web service -- and in many ways i regret that i didn't polish up all of the user management code i added to that, because that would have been a far saner and more straightforward starting point for building a system.

The dilemma I faced this time, and face over and over -- is figuring out when it would be better to leverage existing flawed and over-complicated code -- vs. writing new code from scratch.  Drupal has a system for managing groups (allowing people to invite others to groups, manage them, etc.), and an elaborate system for tagging, etc. -- these are all things that one would have to code into a lightweight framework like CodeIgniter if you didn't build on top of something like Drupal.

Ideally though, i think that the better approach might be to spend some time building just such a foundational framework -- sort of midway between Drupal and something like CodeIgniter (or CakePhp or Ruby on Rails, etc.).. something much more focused on serving programmer's needs as opposed to the frankenstein approach of Drupal.

Or would you just write your own?

And if you did, could you sell it?

one doesn't make money selling such things, though i suppose you could make a career of supporting users if the userbase grew large enough.

one doesn't make money selling such things, though i suppose you could make a career of supporting users if the userbase grew large enough.

How many programmers out there are like you?

Drupal 7 is now public
http://drupal.org/

I hate to do this because it is in many ways unfair to say this without going into details, but i have to say after working with drupal several times now i have to warn people to stay away from it -- it is truly a painful horrible thing to work with.

But each time i decide to give drupal another chance my experience is worse than the last.

Recently i'm working with the drupal forum system and i have to say it is one of the worst, hardest to use, most confusing, least functional, poorly designed forum systems ever designed.  By a large margin.  Stay away from drupal.

No in this case im speaking as an end user -- if you think you a forum is going to be an important part of your website, don't even THINK about using the druapl forum system.

It might still be reasonable to use drupal as your CMS and bridge to another true forum system, but don't even think about using the drupal forum system, it's unbelievably bad.

What exactly would a "wordpress-like CMS system" be? You mean Wordpress, but with all the extra complexity a full-blown CMS needs to do its job?

- Oshyan

Yeah, I know. I'm just suggesting that possibly, to do what a good general purpose CMS does, might remove some of the inherent simplicity and ease of use that Wordpress users love. It may be somewhat the nature of more general purpose CMS systems. After all there are 100s, surely one of them would have "gotten it right" and done what you're suggesting, right? Surely Automattic aren't the only ones with a good UI design sense.

- Oshyan