1) Drupal is not suitable if you want to create anything that hasn’t been created before. In other words, it’s not useful if you are creating something of value. Drupal fanboys reply to criticisms that it’s too complicated by insisting that it’s too powerful and flexible for the person who says so. Unfortunately, Drupal fails here even more than it fails in simplicity. The tiniest change can require tapping into core and that means having to repeat yourself when an upgrade comes.

Unless vanilla Drupal, plus CORE modules are sufficient for you, best make something from scratch. It will be easier in the long run, even if you factor in the time required to make your code secure (which isn’t as hard as people insist it is). I’ve had a few really good Drupal programmers concede this point to me. I’ve been told it’s my fault for “having too many customizations.” Nothing of value is going to be off the shelf and if off the shelf is sufficient for you, then something easier to use like Joomla or Wordpress or Concrete 5 would be a better choice.

2) The community. People who’s livelihood rests on wielding this one hammer (Drupal) against all the screws, pieces of pressboard and antique china the internet has to offer. They insist that everything is possible in Drupal. It’s their mantra, but all that really means is anything is possible in PHP (not really, but I’d let that less preposterous claim slide). There’s great hostility to creativity, wanting to do things in a way that is user-friendly or attractive or using non-standard ajax or javascript. I met quite a few Drupal coders I liked, don’t get me wrong, but asking if anyone has had experience doing something in Drupal on the forums always resulted in “why would you want to do that?” Drupal makes sense only to Drupal developers and are hostile to all criticism, even if it’s valid and constructive. (I’ve seen quite a few non-derogatory posts get deleted that should’ve have been).

Rails is better. MIT license. Or roll out your own PHP CMS using Zend. Or use Django. Or join the Concrete5 community and help them improve their damn good CMS. Or if it’s simple enough, use Wordpress (fun to make plugins for). You can’t make your own web apps in Drupal (I think many Drupal programmers would admit that, but countless Drupal users insist you can and will waste your money trying to make it for you and failing miserably).

However, the biggest reason I think people get frustrated with Drupal is NOT that it’s hard to learn or anything of that kind. In fact, I think it’s EASY to do certain things with Drupal quickly. The hard part is building a site you want exactly the way you want and that seems to require a lot of customization within the framework. The unified administration interface of Drupal makes that a lot harder.

To me, getting a unique community website is about putting several components together and making them seem part of the whole deal: blogs, articles, reviews, news updates, forums, albums, galleries etc. Thing is most CMSes try to unify all these aspects into one solution. Most of them end up being complex and bloated and Drupal seems to be no exception to that rule. As a result, it makes it harder to build something out of a CMS that actually looks UNIQUE and DIFFERENT. Of all the time I spent tweaking around with Drupal, I never felt that I could make it fit into my needs with lesser effort. It seems I was fighting the software to make it work the way I want it. In the end, I figured that the added effort was not worth it.

As an analogy, I’d say Drupal is a wild beast that requires a lot of taming and controlling before you can get it to dance to your tunes. Whether it’s worth it or not depends on your own requirements and patience.