Is Drupal Worth the Trouble?

I've been using Drupal since version 5.2, but lately, I've really started to become annoyed with the framework. OK, not just lately, but more now than ever. Don't get me wrong, I love Drupal. It's just that everything is so complex, and what I really need is simplicity.

For example, I decided I really wanted to add the ability to freely tag posts. Enter the Taxonomy module. Unfortunately, it's way more complex than what I need. I JUST WANT TAGS. Taxonomy requres me to create vocabularies, terms, yada yada yada, and then decides that what I really wanted was forums. No, that's not what I want!

Now admittedly, I'm not working as a full-time web developer any more, so I don't spend a great deal of time under the hood, so to speak. But c'mon, really? After hours of googling around and finding mostly responses which basically told me to RTFM, I gave up. It is what it is. But it's not what I want it to be.

As a consequence, I'm giving serious thought to rolling my own blog into my new Laravel site. Laravel is complex, too, and yet it just seems to be so much more elegantly designed than the cobbled-together mash-up that Drupal has become.