What are some of Drupal's shortcomings?

Drupal gives powerful tools to Non programmers ,They can easily build up a full featured site with less time. But the problem is that learning curve is too high for Drupal.

If a person is new to drupal and want to make something customized it will take lot of time if he wants to do it in proper way. There are lot of ways to do a single thing in drupal,Finding out which is he best or proper for a new comer is a head ache.

i find it awfully complex. as a php developer im tearing my hair out on a daily basis over issues that have nothing to do with php but with drupal itself. how / why / when does it do X? its a big beast that needs to be tamed. documentation is limited to a few very good guides, a whole lot of shitty ones, and even more useless forums threads that always seem to pop up in google.

usability on the backend is crap. a custom theme will also alter the layout of the "admin" part of the package which can be extremely frustrating and results in less than pretty layouts.

if you're working with html slicers, its impossible to use html that has not been created specifically for drupal. it pretty much forces you to use drupal-html, with lots of divs, 5 verbose classes per div, etc. by nature, html/css guys can not be expected to know drupal at this level.

i dont like the way it relies on filenames (10 words long, with very subtle differences between them) to build a theme.

having said that, some of the stuff it can do is very cool and saves you days and days of custom php development

I think it's high learning curve is the only shortcoming as most companies struggle finding good Drupal talent.

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and

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are doing very good job to reduce this high learning curve.