Developing social applications with Drupal

it's not awesome. It's acceptable and you can get a job done with it as far as I can see.

The author hypothesises that people choose plain PHP over drupal because they are scared off by the many configuration options. I'd say it's a case of Drupal having a lot of crap that you don't need.

I'm not sure what the problem was, but Drupal is not the correct solution.

I've used it as a replacement for our ancient bespoke directory system. So far it has been pretty good. Most of the issues I had where in trying to reproduce some aspects of our existing site such as urls. We haven't gone to the next phase where we try to take advantage of it to introduce new features like user voting yet.

The documentation is a little on the light side and you have to learn the language of 'drupalese' before some things start to make sense. The fact that most of the core developers of Drupal don't speak English as their native tongue might play a factor

I've found there is pretty much always some sort of hook to add you code to change things to work without having to mess with the core source code which is nice. Some of the modules may need some code changes but of course nobody is forcing you to use them.

I think it is easy to underestimate the amount of work required for a project whether you are coding it from scratch, using a framework or using something like Drupal. With Drupal (or to a lesser extent a framework) you probably won't notice all the time being saved by having the 'basics' taken care of.