Drupal is pretty slow if you disable the default caching, and sometimes even with the caching (depends on modules loaded) - part of the problem is Drupal's table bloat. I swear a naked install has 100+ tables (and with a few plugins and a few fields enabled, has 250+ tables - so you end up with tens and hundreds of queries per page load).

Varnish fixes everything.

Drupal's big two issues are bootstrapping drupal, because all those module hooks stack up quick, and the sometimes large amount of queries run to generate a page. Drupal 8 has gotten better about not loading half of the world when a blog post is loaded, but 7 is just a wall of functions.

You seem to be mistakenly thinking that more tables by definition always == more queries. That isn't the case. A bunch of those tables rarely get queried.

I really don't understand people's aversion to database tables. I have a join, the world is ending! Pay attention to your indexes and 9 times out of 10 everything will be fine. For that 1 other time, there's Varnish.

Performance hasn't been a priority for WP in the last several releases. WP 3.3 gave a very nice bump, but no much since then.