However, this is what contrib is. You use Drupal because you *want* to use all the zillions of contrib modules out there. Yeah, there should be a better way to find the good ones – and drupalcontrib.com does a good job of that for now, the new drupal.org should improve it as well – but contrib is contrib because it lets you build a site the way you want it. Developers don’t want bloated code any more than designers want bloated XHTML.

On that point–Drupal 7 also improves a lot of the XHTML issues of Drupal 6 and friends. On the other hand, I’m not a designer, but I care more about the ability to make Drupal look the way I want it with as little work as possible than I do about how many extra divs are on my page. Sure, there are ways to make it better, but there’s a compromise involved here in flexibility vs. beauty. That applies to both the code and the design aspects.

When I was first looking for a CMS, Drupal seemed the obvious choice as it is smattered all over the web world as though it is some amazing piece of software. It may be, but it quickly had me running for the hills. Poor organization, poor documentation, billions of unsupported modules to browse through for even the simplest of tasks, time wasting, poor control over end result. Just plain scary to base business decisions on it moving forward. Maybe if you’re an expert php programmer and can fix whatever you need to yourself, but that wasn’t me. It had me thinking maybe I shouldn’t use a cms after all if this is the state of things.

Anyway, Joomla was not much better and perhaps even worse. I never tried WordPress. Instead, I decided to try something you had to pay for: ExpressionEngine. It works, it’s easy, it’s organized, well documented, and, because you have to pay for third party docs, they are good too and generally follow standards. Great support as well and a good community.

If Drupal is any indication of what open source is, open source is for programmers only and leaves everyone else out in my opinion. Good luck to you all in your attempt to organize the open source mess that is Drupal.

This is an interesting take, and well written. I suggest you add some headers to it though, with code freeze so close, I found myself skimming quite a bit and may have missed some crucial suggestions on how to proceed.

I encourage your vision, but a “council of designer elders” is unlikely to work. The problem is that in general, respect in Drupal is hard to come by, and generally involves spending your evenings writing code and arguing – forever – and repeating the process. This sucks, but I’ve found it to be true. Just because Dries says “Here are your design gods”, it doesn’t mean devs will give a hoot, including the ones making the “must-have” modules.

What would appeal to devs IMO is a 3rd party standard of some sort, published docs, etc. This might keep some people om the straight and narrow markup-wise.

The tough thing about Drupal is that it is a framework, and semantic XHTML really wants microformats, and a structure which is coherent on a page. Since WP is a blogging platform primarily, this is easier, Drupal is a “thing maker” so a little hard to paint a coherent picture.

Good luck with this effort nonetheless!

Best,
Jacob