I just finished installing Drupal. It took me much longer than most, as I had a variety of issues/error to deal with because of my hosting provider (GoDaddy).
Remarkably, the error messages produced invariably led me to the exact place I needed to go to fix something. I used to build software for a living, and I have never had such good error messages.
Further remarkably, when I did not understand the error, I'd "google" it, which led me back to the drupal forums or documentation. Every error I encountered was addressed on the drupal.org site.
I actually spent a fair amount of time installing Drupal, when I could have had Mambo, XOOPS, PostNuke and a few other programs pre-installed at no cost by GoDaddy. It seems that this extra time spent installing Drupal will be well worth it, as the HTML/CSS generated by Drupal (with the PHPTemplate theme engine) seems reasonably clean. I'd like to spend some time with the spread-firefox theme, but it is pretty complicated. I also very much like the simplicity of installing modules (and uninstalling them if they don't do what you expect). You can definitely "play around" until you get what you want.
I'd like to say THANKS to the volunteers who have taken the time to make this software and the website/documentation/forum that goes along with it. This seems like a wonderful tool -- very stable and predictable (once installed) and reasonably easy-to-use.