Earlier quoted context omitted.
> so I often daydream about what I'd build if I were given the chance. In a sense I'm in the same position as you, except that it's probably never going to happen and that I've been thinking about this for years. This was me, until three years ago. I am freelancer, all my gigs, clients and my whole network was about Drupal. Hell, I still receive requests for Drupal work on a weekly basis: my name was established, so…
> So I wrote some op-eds on why Drupal was not always a good choice for projects (most notably: government projects) citing from my experience as rescue-consultant-for-failing-drupal-projects. How did those go down and what happened after you wrote them (both from the community & potential clients)? I am sorely tempted to publish some I've written about a CMS over the last 3 years, but prudence has kept me silent so…
Quite some people felt betrayed and were angry. Thing is, though, what I wrote was simply provable true. Backed up with numbers and such. So, I could conteract with "well, then show me what facts are wrong".
For myself, I felt relieved and a little sad. Sad that I could not achieve what I worked so hard for: to make Drupal the best framework for developers to build CMSes with.
The realisation that this was not going to happen, made me angry too. Untill the moment that I realised that pushing Drupal into a direction "it" did not want to go was frustrating. But also that, instead of turning Drupal into a Rails, I'd rather use Rails instead: why spend energy turning it into a framework that already exists, and that I can use today, without spending that energy. (I believe this mechanism is one of the greatest threats to WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and many other PHP-frameworks: once people grow into better programmers, they often simply leave, instead of pulling their framework up with them, to higher levels).