I've been doing Drupal full time for the past four years and I'll agree 100%. People that try to build applications in Drupal are running a fool's errand. It's got a ton of code and another ton of assumptions, but that's the thing; when those assumptions are what you need and that's code you don't have to write, magic happens.

I'd say, 90% of the time, if you're using Drupal and you're in a code editor instead of the admin UI, you're making a mistake, either because there's an easier way to do what you're doing, or because you shouldn't be using Drupal. The real trick is knowing which.