Ok, now for the not so polite rant.

Nice point! you remember me of my first days with Drupal, but I wasn't so angry :) well to be honest I didn't use panels in my first year, nor the second and third, I began to use panels in my fourth year of Drupal. I don't know what site you are trying to build, but it seems a big site, don't forget big sites require hard work. I've worked with so many PHP frameworks, RoR, Java, don't think there is an easy tool for a big project. The point I want to get to is, whatever you want to do in this life if it's a big task, it'll definitely need hard work.

From the opposite side (the beginners' side), you are right, Drupal is known to be hard for beginners, there is an ongoing work to make things easier, such as theming.

So, to get something useful from this post, why not posting a list of things you want to see in Drupal or wish they were easier?

In terms of a frustrated new user rant, it actually isn't that bad. I understand your frustration and can assure you that most people around here have had to learn something new and difficult in relation to Drupal.

I don't have a solution for your problem, but here are a few things that you might want to consider.

1. "What is wrong with me/us" is a question that should always precede "What is wrong with that/them".
2. Because Drupal is free doesn't mean it is easy or without a substantial learning curve, particularly for advanced features.
3. Learning Drupal on little disposable test sites is preferable to learning while building your big project on a deadline.
4. No matter what you learn and despite how much you already know it still takes real effort to learn new ideas and concepts.
5. The amount of support you receive is directly related to how you ask your questions. Read this -> http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
6. Consider how you learn best and structure your activities in a way that suit you best. Hint: Some people learn well while teaching others. Writing documentation is a great way to achieve that.
7. Consider providing support online to people for the things you do know. Help comes faster to the helpers.
8. Ranting never gets you anywhere good. Stay positive and refer to #1 continually.

Keep up the effort! Hard work pays pays great dividends.

Yes, I felt like you at times too, and still do at times ... trying to get my organic groups web site to work caused grief, but now it is beautiful! In the beginning I could not even get a simple site running ... but the community is great, and I have found help, and correction there. Keep persevering, but maybe not for a site with an immediate deadline. I love what I am learning to do with Drupal and I am just at the beginning. I find Earl Miles and Lynette Miles book "Drupal's Building Blocks" (sub heading "Quickly Building Webv Sites withy CCK, Views and Panels) invaluable.

I'm not a coder, and acting in Internet for 11 years, mostly using Open Source technologies, and actively participating in communities, of course. Less than year ago I came to Drupal and I am fascinated!

From my experience I know that carefully thought out site costs hundreds working hours. No problem. Within less that a year I have moved some of my sites to Drupal, and now have 5 sites working and another 4 in development. Building even complex services for endusers is often a pleasure, thanks to lots of components and mechanisms.

However (:-)) I see also a lot of inconsistencies. Most of them seem to me coming out from not clear strategy of integration. Let me explain briefly what I mean.

The power of Drupal is its modular nature. But the general requirements of such concept are not aways met.

• Many infrastructures and important modules have no enough "interfaces" to smoothly integrate with the others.
  Examples: the great Views are too much "closed" - they don't expose query results to other mechanisms easily. For example to the Rules. Great Feeds produce feed items too less "remembering" the source and the Owner feed peculiarities (for example it is impossible to display "all" feed items from particular Owner feed in the block in the context of one feed item actually displayed).

• On the other hand there are infrastructures going "against the stream" and are too integrated internally instead of being modular as much as possible. Examples are really great Media module, or earlier SW Tools - both require a lot of stuff to work properly even if one needs only few.

• Incomplete overlapping of functionalities is probably the most frustrating drawback of some modules. For example using great Display Suite one can get almost the same visual effect as using Panels, and both can get similar results as Views. However, not all elements are interchangeable. So we have no complete compatibility in "anatomy", which would be great when having different "physiology" of these three great infrastructures.

• Unclear distinctions of the functioning of some things. Great example is Chaos Tools Suite. We have Panel Nodes, Panel pages, custom content panes, system pages etc. in the Panels Dashboard. In the other place we have custom Pages. There is no clear documentation or instruction what is the purpose of each and how they work. I was in panic when saw the "Variants" for the first time ;).

Some general concepts seem false or not elaborated enough to me as industrial engineer. For example tokens are extremely practical, however the concept is dangerous as it leads to theoretically infinite tokens' tree. Now we have a kind of crisis in the subject of Field Tokens... The other example is the concept of Entity. Very very promising, but still not clear what are the purposes in every level of Drupal's architecture. Also here is the danger of infinite notions of categories of categories of... categories of Entity.

BTW now some problems arise with identifiers (entity ID vs node ID etc.).

Last but not least the documentation. Example: as many site builders I am not a PHP coder, but quite well familiar with CSS. In many places I found the form to input own CSS class. I tried, without success. I don't know how to deal with them. One complete example would be very useful.

There also should be a strict rule for themes' builders regarding custom CSS. I understand that site wide custom CSS is impossible, but each theme has to have custom.css file registered in such a way that browser reads it as the last one.

I hope the above will not be considered as an awful rant :-)

As a genuine beginner, I have been using Drupal for about 40 weeks. I wanted to learn to create a web site for one specific project.

I am surprised to read that some people think it is easier to write a custom solution than to learn Drupal. There must be thousands of people working on Drupal modules and some work on a few modules nearly full time, so literally I would think much of the functionality could not be replicated by a single person.

One thing I think not so new beginners such as myself could do, since we can not write modules, is to help document current modules. I have come to learn that documentation often does not exist because it does take time to do it correctly.

My site does use a lot of resources, I am on a managed server, up from a $10 per year shared host when started, but I am guessing that is because the site has a lot of features, not because it is Drupal.

So while I have a lot to learn, I know my site would not exist without Drupal.

Anyone looking for books, try out Safari Books Online. There is a little known $100 per year option that lets a user read 5 books at a time.

"Why should anyone want to learn Drupal and in the same amount of time they can learn ASP or PHP and build a custom solution."

Excuse my frankness but this is folly. Drupal and its contributed modules has just about everything covered you could think of; incredibly powerful 'views', caching, localisation, custom content, very sophisticated image handling, ecommerce, actions and events, queuing mechanisms and on and on and on. Practically anything you could think of needing has been done. Other people are writing, it, maintaining it and testing it, that's work you or your business don't have to do.

Your job is to learn to put it together, it isn't that hard. I know D7 is out but I still work in D6 and for that two books will really help you get going:

'Using Drupal' from O'Reilly which is a non-programmer's way in and 'Pro Drupal Development' from Apress 2nd edition. And there are so many resources out there, and look on youtube too.

Persist! it is totally worth it.