Movable Type takes just a little longer to set up than WordPress, but hey, many of us here are hackers right? Plus you can tweak the code to your heart's content.
I think the main thing in the way of people using MT is that lots of people get their first introduction to blogging on some free WP hosting first and consider the switch to commercial shared hosting to be an upgrade. People like this wouldn't see switching blog platform as an upgrade so much as an inconvenience.
The people running Sendmail in the '90s went through all these arguments too.
It's hard to understand how a blog package could have created a worse track record than Sendmail (though I can tell you how). But it did.
Again: avoid Wordpress. If you can't, you have my sympathy.