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>Of course, they never figure out how to edit the site, because the WYSIWYG editor is anything but, and even the text editor "enhances" the html you type in inexplicably.

That hasn't been my experience with tens of sites and tons of clients I've known. Simple, non IT people, can edit the sites and change content VERY easily.

Oh, and of course MILLIONS of people edit their own posts for their blogs in the hosted wordpress.com, with the exact same editor.

So, I call BS.

BS is s pretty strong word. I would suggest that maybe you have different clients than I do. Most of mine throw their hands up very quickly and just have me do it - if they even try. Maybe 50% don't ever attempt to. Things like adding images and links are a challenge for them, especially when canned themes are involved. Some do fine with just plain text. Most don't. But all in all, most of my clients don't want to even think about a website, let alone edit it.

In that case, I would argue that wordpress is not the issue here. It is your client base that does not want to manage their own website which means they are not ideal wordpress users because wordpress as a CMS means that you the user can at least do some content management yourself.

I have come across many potential clients who say "can you do it all for me, i don't want to do anything" and personally for me, they are not good fits to use wordpress. But when someone says "look I just need an easy to use interface to manage my website, content", then I give them wordpress.

I think you misunderstand what I'm trying to say.

WordPress is great for them. They want WordPress because it makes them comfortable to know they are on a "standard platform". They can hire someone else to maintain it if I get hit by a bus. So it's very easy for me to sell, and hosting companies like Flywheel (https://getflywheel.com) make it very easy to maintain. That was the point I was making - Wordpress is great for business. But, compared to other systems I have used, I find it technically very clumsy.

Usually, clients don't really realize they don't want to touch the site until it's in front of them. If I were certain that they would never want to edit before I started, I would be far less inclined to use WordPress, but might anyhow just because of the hosting/maintenance situation and the brand. I get tired of getting emails asking if I've updated the site for the latest high profile security patch. With Wordpress, I can pretty much ignore them with a quick "got it covered" response, because the (good) hosting companies fix this stuff before the clients are generally aware of it. At worst, I log in and click a button. That's great.

So really, I like WordPress, but only because it makes me money and saves me time. Everything else about it is fairly awful to me. I hate working with it. I hate developing in it. I hate that I have to wade through a sea of crappy plugins to find one that is suitable. And, easy as it is for you and I to edit, it's just too complicated for many of my clients. Sure, some of them are fine with it. But more often the CMS winds up being for me, not them.

This is all just my personal experience slogging through this stuff for the past several years. Milage may vary.

Opposite experience here. Some users like to use gmail to compose their posts (long event listings that they also email) and wp wrecked the html every time. I switched them to Drupal and set-up wysiwyg with ckeditor showed them the paste icon and they couldn't be happier. They thought it was easier to use since they didn't have to go to a separate admin screen to add content, it was all right their for them.

Is Ghost or Jekyll anyway better in terms of tech and other business factors?

I'm genuinely asking here :)

No idea about Ghost. I found Jekyll to be too limited for client work - but it's been a good 18 months since I used it.

I have handed the CMS keys for Ghost to non-technical people with good results. There's no doubt that it's more limited (especially in terms of plugin ecosystem) than WP, but that lack feels liberating. No need to agonize over which contact form plugin is the right one to go with, etc. And Ghost is certainly snappy [0].

[0]: http://blog.appdynamics.com/nodejs/an-example-of-how-node-js...

Custom code is great if you have staff programmers. If you do not, one of the upsides to WordPress is letting end customers - not the programmers - agonize over which plugins to use.

if your clients cant understand the difference between post and page after 5 minutes of explaining, they are clearly nincompoops and no cms will ever be able to put them out of their misery.