Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people are attached to Wordpress for the same reason we are attached to Javascript. At the time, it was one of the only ways of easily creating a blog. The problem with Wordpress is that once you need to do something outside of the norm then all of the sudden you need deep knowledge of Wordpress's inner workings.
There was never a time when WordPress was the only easy way for even a non-technical person to create a blog, they just did a great job marketing that that was the case. I spent a very brief time as a contributor to WP internals (not core by any means but a handful of contributions) and not only do you need a lot of internal knowledge to do anything outside of point-and-click, like you said, a lot of the core folks h…
Once the plugin ecosystem sprung up around it, WP was off to the races.