Why is Drupal difficult?

Drupal is famous for a steep learning curve, and justifiably so. In many ways it seems that Drupal is built for experts. While I love Drupal and enjoy building websites with it I have to ask; does Drupal have to be difficult? Is that steep learning curve necessary? I'll say that its not technically necessary and that it comes out of the culture and philosophy of the Drupal development community.

Now Drupal does and makes possible lot of very complex stuff and thats great, but its also called to do a lot of simple stuff. Drupal is frequently very frustrating because while it makes the very hard possible, it also makes the very easy hard!

Take for example some thing as simple as putting an email subscription box on the front page of your website, that collects email addresses, stores them in the database. Lets say you just have a simple blog. You can't do that out of the box, you have to find a module and believe me there is no easy choice. Your best bet is to spend a few hours setting up simplenews and associated modules. One reasonably expects such functionality to be in core. For that matter shouldn't the ability to email all content simply be part of core? For a non coder such as myself this appears obvious. Of course it may be technically infeasible. But is that really the case. We have a book module, a blog module and even a poll module in core. Would an email module that did the above and more be technically difficult?

You, dear reader, can of course think of pet projects or ideas you would like to see in core. But I think we can all agree on some core aspects of websites, that a fully formed CMS should be able to do in point and clicky fashion, right out of the box. Here is my list of what every website owner would like to have right away.

- easy content creation this means text, graphics, video and sound
- easy interaction with site visitors i.e login/logout, email collection and communication, content upload, social media integration
- excellent security i.e permissions, roles, updating, content validation (Drupal is excellent here)
- statistics i.e data collection, tracking, page views etc

In short everybody wants to put up some text, pictures and multimedia. Everybody wants to know who visits their site and everybody wants to be able to sign those people up for something. This means everybody wants to gather email addys and send email.
So what that says to me is that this stuff should all be in core. We should'nt need a separate, email or link module or a separate module to pick up email addresses. We should'nt need to install captcha. These should come with core. There should be a basic easy to use wysiwyg text editor as part of core. Some thing like the ecard module functionality should be in there to allow mailing of all content. Out of the box. One click turn on and pointy clicky configuration, no coding.

Now I know that as a non coder, who just uses Drupal to build sites I'm vulnerable to being accused of just making demands. Thats not what I want to do. I know I probably should be figuring out how to roll up my sleeves and get this stuff in core. But Drupal has a vast development community, a great deal of expertise, and so I have to ask.

Is it that these things are hard to do technically, laborwise or timewise or is it that the devs consider them unnecessary and hence do not prioritise them. The situation is great for people with the expertise be cause we can figure out what to use and how to make it all hang together. But I think its limiting the appeal of Drupal.