A have a polite rant, and concerns

Regarding upgrades - I have never dumped all my contrib modules. In my sites all my contrib modules live in /sites/all/modules - so I just leave that alone. If your modules are not somewhere in the /sites directory then you are doing it wrong, since this directory should never be overwritten during an upgrade. All I do is remove the /sites folder from the new version before uploading all the other Drupal files to the server.

Before I upload I take the site offline (put it in maintenance mode) and then after the upload is complete go the modules page and run the Update. Done. Its actually very painless and takes about 10 minutes. Also, I usually do this on my localhost first, to make sure nothing blows up.

So no need to wipe out and start over, that would be pretty nuts, I have never done this within a major version (upgrading between major versions say D6 to D7 can be somewhat more complicated, since you have to upgrade all the contrib modules also, and really requires a more robust process and testing).

Regarding D8, well it takes years to build a new version of Drupal, and rest assured many people are still working on improvements for Drupal 7, but we have to look forward, plan for the future and give ourselves plenty of time to build the next version. Remember - its this forward thinking that has made Drupal the most kicking ass CMS around.

Well, I will own my mistake. I did indeed put the extra modules in the core module directory. I'm getting older now, and can't remember where I got the idea to put them there, or what I do from one day to the next. In my defense, I should point out that the first extra module I added was the Omega module and related stuff. And when I uploaded it, I put that into the wrong directory. But, I was reviewing the instructions and found that I had made a mistake, and put it in the proper place. After messing around with Omega a little, I figured I really need to learn things first on a standard theme, and get a handle on Organic Groups. I can't tell you where I was instructed to put stuff in the modules directory, because I don't remember. It may have been a video, or, it may have been just my assumption or insistence to put modules in that directory. It says "modules." I probably saw that and thought that's where they go, even after being instructed to put them in "sites/all/modules.' Maybe the name of the directory could be changed in the future to core-extensions or something other than "modules."

Let me add a little something here. One of my biggest problems with Joomla was their modules. They have a big problem with developers writing modules that effectively overrides core functionality. K2 is a content oriented module to deliver multiple topic News/magazine style web sites. It basically takes over the user/member functions of Joomla's core and replaces them with it's own. Community Builder is similar to Organic Groups, and it also takes over user/member functions of Joomla's core. So, you can use one or the other, but not both. And, if someone comes along and writes a nice Shibboleth mod for Joomla's core, you won't be able to use it.

Also, as I was trying to get Community Builder up and running, I found that to have group forums, a particular forum module had to be use. Unfortunately, Joomla had made a significant minor release change to a relatively new major release. The developers of the forum had released a new major point version (6.0) to comply with the new Joomla major release. They had released a minor version (6.1) which people had been adopting. Then Joomla dropped a bomb on them with a significant change that crippled all 6.0 and 6.1 versions of their forum. I'm fairly convinced that the developers of the Community Builder module were aware of this problem. However, that didn't stop them from offering a paid product that relied on another module for some of their functionality.

These two situations don't seem to be a problem with Drupal as such. But, Drupal has it's own situation regarding modules. I would really suggest that even though Drupal has a good relationship with module developers, a number of which seem to be well known to the Drupal community, that a certification process be created for modules and membership requirement for module developers in some form of group. Maybe you guys have this to some degree already. And if I haven't found it yet, a mediawiki installation for documentation and learning would be great too.

Anyway, thanks for the replies, and for listening.