Interesting article. I actually do like developing for WordPress, but agree with you on many points. I'm just in the middle of having to write extra code to create a table in the database to hold some additional meta data for a custom taxonomy (sigh). Like many developers (I suppose), I've just built a small set of tools that allow me to get round some of the major issues, and starting with a decent theme (I'm quite a fan of Roots) can allow some pretty solid web development. It's never going to be quite as good as a ground-up build, but finding the hours to push into user interface development is hard - the settings and admin screen APIs in WordPress aren't bad.