"Where did I say I didn't mind writing my own platform?"
My point was exactly this. Rather than writing your own platform, which will most likely be less secure (but not vulnerable to blanket attacks), you could just write the plugins you want and a theme and then Wordpress is absolutely no hassle at all to maintain. Everything is done via auto-update and after you've made a theme you never have to touch code again and you wont have to suffer feature-wise.
I have never once had auto-update fail and I run 10-15 off-the-shelf plugins.
There are things more secure, they are elegant, but they are definitely not less of a hassle to maintain. I have yet to see any platform (though I haven't studied those outside of the Rails community that thoroughly) that have an auto-update feature so complete and problem-free that Wordpress has.
If you are to say just one good thing about Wordpress, it is that it is hassle-free to maintain. This is the reason it has become popular, the only way any sort of software can become popular is when people without coding experience or knowledge of how to admin a server can maintain and update it.
Since you haven't updated it for a couple of versions, I'd strongly recommend you do so and try using it again. A lot of development happens and I'd suggest you build a new opinion on what Wordpress actually is today.
If you still don't think auto-updating everything and installing both themes and plugins from the admin-page without having to touch the filesystem manually – you can try to find something easier, but I sincerely doubt you will.