[eaton]

FWIW, the "Drupal should be a framework" vs "Drupal should be a web page management tool" issue wasn't a matter of ignorance in the community as much it was a point of contention — there were fairly high-profile talks at Drupalcon as early as 2011 hitting on that very issue, and some of the linguistics stuff you mention was coming up in core conversations not much later than that. (Source: Was the crazy guy ranting about content-as-a-languagelike-system-of-communication in many of those conversations. Whew, DITA. Memories.)

The challenge, I think, is that by that point in time Drupal had gone through its first big popularity explosion, and was starting to grapple with the competing interests of many different audiences. Acquia ended up being instrumental in steering it towards "enterprise sites with complicated UGC requirements," but for quite some time the open source ideal of "the project reflects the priorities of the people who contribute time to it" meant it lacked a strong, opinionated take on many of the things you mention.

For many years Drupal's strength was (IMO) that enough of _those folks_ existed in the community to ensure you could build complex, highly adaptable structured content systems with it... and enough of _those other folks_ existed in the community to ensure that there were click-together content display and delivery tools that worked with the complex content. If you approached it with a clear understanding of where some of those boundaries were, you could build really amazing things — but if you came in looking for a well-paved path to build a simple site or architect a complex one, well... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

edit -- clicked on your profile and read some of your posts in other threads, and I feel like I should just get a beer and commiserate with you about doomed CCS initiatives for a few hours. I salute you.