"Oh, he says he was in charge of WordPress interface design for two years. Using WordPress causes me pain. I expect this product to be painful."
Wait, what?
WordPress' backend may be a mess, but it's CMS interface is the only one I've ever trained a non-technical person on that they liked or seemed to be able to use right away. I worked at a marketing/dev shop for years and have probably trained 40-ish non-techy clients (usually small marketing teams of 3-4) on customized CMS installs. WordPress' dashboard was by far the best when it came to power/usability ratio.
A lot of people feel their data is exceptional, and so meta data is where I see "custom" hurt content creation the most: Whereas WordPress has a neatly rolled meta data extensions into "Custom Fields" many CMS degrade into a morass of form fields.
People should be wary of custom built CMS UIs, not only because most people have learned a UI like WordPress or Tumblr.
> "Oh, he says he was in charge of WordPress interface design for two years. Using WordPress causes me pain. I expect this product to be painful."
Sadly, this is too common of a fallacy in judgment, and one that seems most non-fallacious on its face. But whether we want to admit it or not, sometimes output and achievements are highly impacted -- even dependent -- on the organization and institution than the individual. So someone highly successful at Apple retail, for example, may flounder at JCPenney's (http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/a-dose-of-realism-for...).
So it goes both ways. It's wrong to argue that someone who was great at once place will necessarily be great at another. And conversely, someone who's work turned out awful at one place (either by poor management or design-by-committee), may flourish in different circumstances
I don't think anyone is invulnerable to this. The only (partial) salvation is to be aware of it, take it with a (big) grain of salt, and try to overcome it with factual reasoning when making decisions.
WP owes most of it's success to the UI, it is the very reason it became so popular. It continues to this day to sooth and empower end users, so much so that the actual users often think they are developers, that is what you call a successful interface. WP lead the way with UI more so than any platform, much like Apple, they realize the importance of UX.
If you think the UI is painful that I don't have a lot of faith in your ability to objectively judge interfaces especially in the context of history.
* "Oh, a New Zealand accent. One of us! I hope this is really awesome and I want to try this out already."
* "Oh, he says he was in charge of WordPress interface design for two years. Using WordPress causes me pain. I expect this product to be painful."