Sorry, I jumped to a couple conclusions from your original post. When you said "the platform itself is just too crap" I just assumed you meant tech, so that's why I mentioned Laravel, which most PHP devs consider better, code-wise. But both could have products developed for them.

> The fact that 25% of the web is powered by it doesn't mean 25% of the web will actually pay for your solution

You're right, of course, that not everyone in any market might buy whatever my product is. But I'd rather have an opportunity to sell to a market that includes millions rather than thousands, purely so that I could write more beautiful code. And yes, a bigger market means that you're competing with more people, but I think the numbers still stand.

> I would also be skeptical about the amount of money you could make on WP vs Laravel or a similar framework.

As well you should. Developers are a notoriously cheap market, especially for software. Why buy it when I can build it? :-)

But I'm skeptical that one could make a more financially successful product around another, better code-based product (and again, I think that's the scope of our debate, which is my assumption). Few code-based markets can compare to the size of WordPress, so even if you could charge 10x as much for a product, you still might make more selling at a lower price to a bigger market.

And yes, I will probably always make more per hour as a contract developer, but the extra $1k/month buys me a lot of beer and pays for ever conference I want to go to (especially Wordcamps :-) ).