Having been a .Net web developer for almost five years now, I can't help but get the feeling that .Net simply isn't conducive to a truly extensible CMS. I recently deployed a major Microsoft website based on the Orchard CMS, which is phenomenally dynamic, but it does nothing to manage it. Also, it's stupidly slow. I see no reason why a site as content-simple as Orchard's own site should take several seconds of server processing to load. I mean, having been in the nitty-gritty of it, I "get" it, but that's still no excuse. It can be expanded very easily, but to what end? Every additional layer makes managing the content one layer harder, and Orchard does very little to make the content management easy.

Also, in my old-school eyes, the whole concept of MVC is just broken. Give me five levels of control over things I never had any interest in controlling? Force specific URL structures that aren't necessarily conducive to a clean user experience? It seems like every major .Net utility is geared at an audience it doesn't understand, and thus far, YetAnotherForum.Net is the only one I've used that sets out to accomplish a task, and accomplishes it well. Everything else has been bloated, inefficient, and/or just a pain in the ass to deal with.

I swear, in the time I spent wrangling Orchard into serving all of our needs clumsily, I could have written a custom tool to provide exactly what we needed in half the time, and the page load times would be in the half-second range, not five seconds. The more time goes on and the more experience I get, the less I can support any CMS from a developer's perspective. I mean, I "get" it, I just don't see the point. In the time spent customizing, training, and supporting a client website built on a mainstream CMS, I could build and deploy a custom tool that makes every task painfully simple, and has no features that aren't necessary. Streamlined tools are more conducive to getting shit done, and CMS's are not streamlined.

Sorry, I guess I just needed to rant... I've been specializing in User Experience development lately.. my current job title is Interactive Developer... my living is made by creating tools to help people get shit done faster. Thus far in my experience, no mainstream CMS has ever come close to the efficiency provided by a tool built for the job, even if that job is content management.