What's so bad about WordPress?

People like me who've been around the blog block a couple of times have taken to saying that WordPress is clunky, is showing it's age, and takes too much work to tune for reasonable performance.

Honestly, we get a little carried away with this. It's true that WordPress has gotten pretty clunky, but at the same time, there are a great many things about WordPress that are an absolute pleasure. You can have a fantastic looking site--especially a blog or content site--up and running in no time at all. It has a user management interface that takes care of all sorts of user management drudgery. And there are excellent plugins for a few key features that a web site is quite likely to need (WordPress boosters talk about how many thousands of plugin there are, but for the vast majority of users, this is largely irrelevant).