In fairness to the WordPress developers, the quality of the product has been pretty consistently getting better over the last few years.

There's still plenty of warts, of course, but that seems true of just about every widely used piece of software -- bad decisions early on in development become very hard to walk back later when any of millions of sites/themes/plugins/etc. could turn out to be depending on that bad decision being there...

Saying there's little competition is a huge stretch. WordPress is the dominant force by a large margin. But from small static site generators, hosted platforms, other open source alternatives, to enterprise-ready solutions there are a lot of competitors hitting nearly every segment of the market.

http://trends.builtwith.com/cms provides some good trends of the big players, but I wouldn't put too much stock in it.

That said, as a developer who has fallen into the WordPress business out of necessity, there are a lot of great products out there that are built much better than WordPress and I wish one of them were the dominant player. Still, WP manages to get the job done most of the time.

> there are a lot of great products out there that are built much better than WordPress and I wish one of them were the dominant player.

Honest question: Can you name one?

I'm seriously looking for a WordPress alternative, but I haven't found one that is truly BETTER.

What I mean by this is others have a better structured, more solid & easily extendable code base, better separation between presentation and logic, etc.. Obviously, this is somewhat of an opinion, and it only refers to the underlying structure. For the end user, WordPress is probably the best. A large part of this is due to its ecosystem of plugins and themes. You shouldn't need to build custom code on top of WordPress unless you are doing something very unique, building an application (as opposed to a "website"), or attempting to tie together several plugins.

Sticking with PHP, both http://modx.com/ and http://www.silverstripe.org/ are fairly popular and well-built. I've also heard good things of http://www.concrete5.org/ , http://www.movabletype.com/ , http://textpattern.com/ , and http://ellislab.com/expressionengine . http://habariproject.org/en/ has also been built specifically to address many of the faults in WordPress and other popular systems.

Isn't MoveableType in Perl?

Possibly - I've never done anything with it. The PHP statement was really only for the first two, sorry for the confusion!

depending on what type of project you are building you might want to have a look at yeager (http://www.yeager.cm). although the site states beta, the tool is stable and used in live environments since several years.

So you're basically saying that following bad practices is inconsequential since - among the thousands of CMSes, WordPress is the most widely adopted, despite an abundant availability of alternatives that claim to be simpler, more powerful and prettier. Interesting thought.

Worse is better.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

Speaking of competition. A while ago I saw an announcement of the Habari project, set out to build a "WordPress done right". I checked just now and they're still around. Released v0.9, which is PHP 5.3 only. It may be worth a look for those who seek a more modern approach.

http://habariproject.org

I wasn't aware of this, but mildweed posted later that PDO is coming. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4907099

No one is forcing you (or anyone) to use WordPress.