"The technical winners (Panels, complex ODBC, entity fields…) were the opposite of what we were rooting for. I’d rather configure my apps with code rather than layers of complex and limitating UI."

I'm not sure what you mean by "complex ODBC" since ODBC is not used in Drupal. The opposite of what you were rooting for is for the end-user to have less power and the coder more power. Get this, Drupal is not taking that power away from you, it is giving some of it to the end-user. It is 2014 and there are still products out there that you have to modify using in-line code in order to get a simple feature such as hiding the author of a post. This is where Drupal gets it right, by letting the end user have more power, they get the site they want, not the site that a coder hands them. Don't like the way posts are displayed on the home page, then create a new view in a UI, not in a php while loop.

There are some beautiful things in Drupal and Drupal 8 is going to be even better. Drupal is an excellent example of software getting better by rebuilding, using best practices rather than just keeping cruft from 10 years ago.