It's boils down to a tradeoff between design simplicity and functionality.

Honestly, I haven't seen any Drupal designs/UXs that have really bowled me over. But I think the reason for that relates a lot to the fact that the sites that prefer to use Drupal want to take advantage of the additional functionality offered by modules. The modules often add a lot more boxes, navigational options, and other major elements (forums, e-commerce, etc.) that make the UX far more complex than what you might find on a Wordpress blog.

True, but even Wordpress puts all it's editing in a seperate admin area, like it's been done the last 20 years of CMSes.