FWIW, the "Drupal should be a framework" vs "Drupal should be a web page management tool" issue wasn't a matter of ignorance in the community as much it was a point of contention — there were fairly high-profile talks at Drupalcon as early as 2011 hitting on that very issue, and some of the linguistics stuff you mention was coming up in core conversations not much later than that. (Source: Was the crazy guy ranting about content-as-a-languagelike-system-of-communication in many of those conversations. Whew, DITA. Memories.)
The challenge, I think, is that by that point in time Drupal had gone through its first big popularity explosion, and was starting to grapple with the competing interests of many different audiences. Acquia ended up being instrumental in steering it towards "enterprise sites with complicated UGC requirements," but for quite some time the open source ideal of "the project reflects the priorities of the people who contribute time to it" meant it lacked a strong, opinionated take on many of the things you mention.
For many years Drupal's strength was (IMO) that enough of _those folks_ existed in the community to ensure you could build complex, highly adaptable structured content systems with it... and enough of _those other folks_ existed in the community to ensure that there were click-together content display and delivery tools that worked with the complex content. If you approached it with a clear understanding of where some of those boundaries were, you could build really amazing things — but if you came in looking for a well-paved path to build a simple site or architect a complex one, well... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
edit -- clicked on your profile and read some of your posts in other threads, and I feel like I should just get a beer and commiserate with you about doomed CCS initiatives for a few hours. I salute you.
> if you’re planning to be a top 10 site on the internet, you’ll need a custom stack
To be fair, that's the case with pretty much any CMS. Even if they start with a stock system, by the time they actually hit top 100/1000 (let alone 10) there's a lot of custom work to be done.
And realistically, a "top 100/1000 site" is almost always going to have a cloud of other sub-sites and related properties. The corporate site, intranet/HR, jobs and recruiting, press center... The penumbra of "Oh, yeah, we need one of those... but it would be ridiculous to build it from scratch" sites for a large organization can be pretty large indeed.
I've been doing software professionally for about thirty years now, and what's interesting to me is that the conversations I had with my grandfather about factory work involved all of the same dynamics. Prototyping new solutions versus consistent reproduction of known solutions? People who only understand their own tasks versus those who have a holistic understanding of the components, the process, and the final product? Troubleshooting unexpected failure states in complex systems and fixing mission-critical problems that can make or break the business, versus checking out when The System Breaks? Conflicts between book-smart college grads and grizzled vets who know how things "really work" under the hood?
Those are the stories he told me about working in a factory, and frankly the lessons I learned from him were just as valuable as any "fifteen lessons for software architects" books our industry has produced. Sure — software is unique! So is food, so is metal, so is film, so is concrete…
People don't deserve unions because they're 10x workers. People deserve unions because they're workers.
I think a working model of a technology union would have to work closely to professional sports unions or acting unions that support wide disparities in pay. I think historical tech opposition to unions is people not wanting the idea of a standardized wage and extremely high job security (which acts as a downward force on wages). Many people look for something like the Netflix model where you're expected to move on if you're not producing lots of value, but you get compensated more for it. The thing about having 10x engineers being possible is that everyone thinks they are above 1x and deserve above average pay.
Unions don’t exist so that people you consider unskilled will get raises. Unions exist so that people who sell their labor can cooperate to influence the conditions they work in.
If you consider nothing more important than your own individual compensation, and have absolute faith in your own irreplaceable genius, it’s easy to make a case against unions — sort of like “there is no prisoner’s dilemma, why would I ever cooperate?”
This reminds me of mirror-universe conversations I've had with executives about developer experience for APIs. If an API functions and is technically capable of performing all of the operations that are business-critical, it works and is good; why complain? "Developer Experience" is just a fluffy, hand-wavey kind of mysticism that's so subjective no one can be expected to care about it!
The whole post boils down to: "HTML is bad because it has scope creep and people use it for bad things, but PDF is good because I made this particular document in a way I like for a use case I prefer."
You do you, man! Some people run Archie servers, some people create a directory full of PDFs.
