From my personal experience, small businesses really want to just be able to infrequently add or update content. Most of the time, WordPress seems like a huge hammer for small nails.
Can anyone recommend a light-weight system that allows the "regular folks" add or update content without the extras (such as changing "themes", etc)?
If you want something lighter yet, I highly recommend http://getkirby.com/ (no affiliation, just a fan). It's very lightweight, runs on a variation of MarkDown, highly flexible, and unlike most of the "static site generators" out there it has a minimal panel for adding and editing content. The $39 per site license is well worth it.
How is the programming model out of date? I am looking at getting into it via the new v6.0. It has ASP.NET MVC support but the CMS itself is still WebForms.
static html is the way to go these days.
I position any project as a way to increase business through design, SEO/SEM, conversion rate optimization, but I find frequently that WordPress is a selling point.
WordPress has become popular enough that many smaller businesses who need a (new) website and do a few minutes of research often come across it. Most of what they read tells them that it's the best platform for their website. They don't really know why, or what WordPress does, but they get it in their heads that they want a WordPress website. Not that there's anything wrong with that in and of itself.
The same thing used to happen with Flash. Clients would come to me insistent on having a Flash website, or at the very least, a Flash intro page. This one there does come with an inherent problem. Thankfully, this one has gone to the wayside.