Wordpress is a code architectural mess, but as a CMS it's one of the best I've ever seen. (CMS's are deceptively complicated to build)

People saying it's shitty don't know what they are talking about (even you point out others you've tried are worse).

Wordpress is best in class for what it is: open source content manager. It's best use case is for a simple blog. It can be bashed into submission to be an ok general CMS or even a community managment solution. Past that though, it's architecture falls to pieces - but then, you wouldn't use a hammer to drill a hole would you?

The real difficulty in CMSs isn't in making the CMS, it's making a CMS that is reasonably extensible and configurable by end-users as well as coders.

Too far into that extreme gets into Drupal-land.

I'm with you.

Saying WP is a shitty CMS is easy, but where is a good alternative? There is none.

Anyone can say anything about WordPress, but the FACT is that it's most used CMS, with a BIG community and market arround it.

ExpressionEngine is quite nice and packs a punch for $300. Much more elegant than WP, Drupal, or Joomla in my experience. The CodeIgniter PHP framework was extracted from it years back and got quite popular.

CodeIgniter is basically dead now. It was great especially the documentation, I built many websites with it. Laravel seems to be the best choice for PHP frameworks, or just use Slim Framework. As for EE, never used it, the price tag was just too high, WordPress won out by being open source, free, and easy for end-users.

I found Umbraco very pleasant to work with.