...agree, there has to be a way to do Drupal "properly", otherwise it wouldn't be so popular. But you have to agree that Drupal does need quite a lot of "special care", too much for my taste, in the way of planning and doing things its way and knowing that stuff will start randomly falling apart once you start working "against it". Things that are either "just a blog engine / just a CMS" (Wordpress) or "just a framework" (pick your fav here) are much harder to misuse and turn into a total mess. For me the whole point of using PHP is "fail fast, fail cheap, be 80% idiot-proof", and I just use Drupal as an example of outlier PHP project that went very, very far away from this mantra, but then again, maybe going away from this mindset is what you need for your projects.
The way to "do drupal properly", which makes it so popular, is to use it almost as a "lego" platform, which is also much the same as how you would use wordpress.
Both of them have such powerful plugin/extension frameworks, that most of the effort in building drupal or wordpress sites is finding the right plugins, and skinning. Very little actual programming work is required to get an operation site running for a client in either framework, which makes them ideal for many of these low-yield "corner store" sites.
