I hope this post will be read by the people who code and document Drupal.
First, the formalities. I have 25 years experience in programming at various levels.., I am a first-timer with Drupal which I have been evaluating for about two weeks.
First the good news. It's a great CMS. I have evaluated others and it is the best, at least for the kind of projects I need to set up.
Now for some comments, some of which apply to all open source projects. Let's start with Drupal specifics.
For a a cms that is based on nodes, the Drupal site itself does a poor job of structuring as a tree the information needed by people to get started. The current situation is not acceptable for a project of its quality and size. Why couldn't people here access a start node called "Drupal" and navigate down until they find the information that they are looking for? As it stands, the site is a jungle of information that jumps at you from every direction and by the time you are overloaded with it, you haven't found what you needed. Then people start posting questions in forums, often in the wrong areas, and the problem continues.