> 1. You can't afford the talent required to pull off a bespoke CMS.
> 2. You can't afford the cost of lifecycle maintenance on a bespoke CMS.
Us at The Texas Tribune or potential Armstrong users? We're doing pretty fine with our CMS. Armstrong users won't have to pay to maintain an entire CMS since community maintenance should take care of most of their needs. They'll have to pay to maintain their templates and additions to the CMS, but they're already paying for those with their current CMS. I think Armstrong will end up saving many news organizations money over going with a proprietary solution.
> 3. Newspaper editors make horrible PM's on software development projects.
Is this in regard to the Armstrong project itself or implementations of it? There's little editorial interaction with Armstrong. We know what the two newsrooms involved need, and we've already built a CMS that satisfies those needs. Now we're abstracting out our unique needs and trying to anticipate the places where other implementors will need to make customizations. I think it'll work out fine.
Now that we've estabished your efforts are (at best) doomed to mediocrity drop what you're doing immediately and go check out Pressflow.
No thanks. I and many other developers are more productive in Python than in PHP. If there's a barrier between your CMS and the news applications you want to integrate with it, you will be even less productive, and many possible projects will be written off from the get go. (We could do everything in PHP/Drupal, but no.) For more on that, see Matt Waite's recent article: http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/03/matt-waite-to-build-a-digit...
No developer in a news organization wants to be faced with an "All these worlds are yours, except the CMS. Attempt no landings there" type of situation. A news CMS built using the tools that developers want to build news applications with is a huge win.