I find it incredible that you can instantly tell a WordPress blog no matter how customized the theme is. There's just something terrible about it no matter what you do. 175 HTTP requests to load a 170KB page...
That's nothing, I've seen Wordpress pages that become >4MB because they load dozens of JS and CSS files from many plugins (plus a bunch of heavy PNGs and sometimes some freaking iframes!), essentially you get a customized WP site that is the pure definition of bloat and garbage. The same people that do this call themselves WP wizards because they're able to "integrate" different plug-ins, dual hand face-palm is not enough to describe the situatioin there... The number of XSS attacks on such sites is just staggering. My immediate reaction is to close the browser tab when I encounter those.