The subject is deliberatly provacative and I hope it results in additional people reading the post as I really need to get into discussion with others looking at similar kinds of issues. If you do not need or are not interested to know how Drupal works interally and the implications for performance and speed of development, then you should probably not read further.
I am a relative Drupal newbie having trouble understanding whether or not Drupal is appropriate for the kind of web applications I develop and if so, whether one should try to build such applications using existing Drupal modules or one needs to build custom modules for most functions. Beyond that, I want to be confident that the basic architecture of Drupal is suitable to my needs.
I am a great believer in Application Frameworks and I like the idea of a community of developers leveraging each other's efforts or even working together on functionality that would benefit many. However, that only works when the community more or less agrees on what a good core framework should look like. If the kinds of applications the community members are trying to build vary too much from what others are trying to build, the ability to leverage one another's work might be minimal.
I am hoping someone can help me get into discussion with other members of the community that might be struggling with the same issues I am (or better yet have completing their analysis and may be able to either give me the confidence that Drupal is the way to go, give me guidance as to which parts of Drupal might be suitable or tell me Drupal is not suitable so I can move on). At the same time I would just be interested in discussion with others who are as interested in the design of application frameworks as they are in building a specific application on a framework.
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