Please don't lump PHP into the pile of shameful garbage that is the DrupalPress world. Most Drupal developers don't even know how to write modern production quality PHP since one does very little writing of PHP when building a Drupal based website. I've even spoken to a couple people who consider working with Drupal for an extended period of time an automatic disqualification for applicants of PHP developer positions. There is a lot of great PHP being written these days. It's just far, far away from DrupalPress.
Is there a good alternative to Drupal? I haven't peeked under the hood but as a user I was super impressed with how easily I could snap together a heavily customized Drupal site with user-driven contributions that were well-structured. Not just blogs, but we were running maps for the Cube /Sauerbraten game engines with screenshots and compatibility-tags whatnot, and use flexinode to provide a consistent structure to the list of content. Users could rate the content, comment, moderate comments, etc.
The plugin system was well-curated and the config pages were powerful and clear.
Drupal may be awful under the hood, but I was very impressed with how much I could do without peeking under there or even googling "how do I X?".
I'd love to see somebody take a modern tech stack like .Net Core and Postgres or something like that and build a cleaner version of same.
