It's the internet, it largely doesn't matter how precise you are someone will find a way to correct you somehow ;).
That said your advice on using Symfony2 or something else over Drupal is extremely valid and I can say that as I used Drupal for a couple of years and ran into all the usual issues (worked fine for non-logged in, fell over with a few hundred logged in users), as a nice way to generate largely static content for end users it's just about acceptable but people seem determined to not use it for that, whether you can blame Drupal for that or the end users is an interesting question I guess.
Oh good lord... I thought my Drupal sites were fine until for one of them it required a small amount of logged-in users. Performance was terrible so I enabled some dev module to see what was going on. I was faced with a ridiculous amount of queries, each of full of joins.
I now don't use Drupal anymore, although I might occasionally whip it out for a site that only requires a few admins to log in...
