I've said many times -- publicly, in articles I've written, and to the clients that we consult with -- that Drupal is not a magical solution to any problem. It is a BAD solution to many problems. Crystal Reports is a terrible social publishing tool, too. No technology, no framework, no product, is made of magical unicorns and rainbows. It's worth noting that a huge percentage of the Drupal community is made of passionate individuals who found it when looking for solutions to small-scale problems, and began participating in and giving back to the community. The tools and solutions they find essential will not be the same ones needed by, say, the New York Observer or SonyBMG. When those companies use Drupal, it will be used in different ways. Consultants and development shops who don't acknowledge and understand this -- who sell a Drupal-Or-Nothing approach to every problem they're given, are either wearing blinders or unscrupulous.

We just spent two days talking to a client who had started to build a data warehousing application with CCK and Views, given the community's emphasis on those tools. They were concerned this was the wrong path and wanted reassurance from us. We offered no reassurance -- that IS the wrong path! Drupal's sweet spot, for them, was presenting quickly customizable user-facing functionality to customers, while feeding data to an external warehouse built using more traditional tools.

Someday, they might migrate to a homebrew solution, a Django app, or any number of options for the public-facing portions. For now, though, it's enough for them to realize that they can step back, build the "enterprise" portions of their project with tools that make sense, and use Drupal for the portions that it excels at -- fast turnaround user-facing social content publishing. If that message isn't being discussed in the Drupal community a lot, the reason is simple -- there's a large pool of people making band web sites, magazine sites, social publishing tools, etc., than there are people building high-octane enterprise systems.

I don't hear anyone in the Ruby community telling me that RoR shouldn't be used to automate industrial control systems, either -- but that doesn't imply that DHH is leading a conspiracy to deceive the manufacturing industry. Is it that difficult to grasp?