In reply to Christina Stanley-Webb.

No, it is hard to know why it is dreaded, but there are many many reasons for that, and being a snob programmer is probably not one of them. True programmers with some experience probably saw code which is worse then WordPress's code and much less documented and they are having a laugh at all the numerous WTF moments wordpress has to offer.

I guess the dreading comes from people that think that all you need to do to have a working website is to maybe install some plugins and copy & paste some code they can find over the internet. It probably wasn't true even 5 years ago and for sure it is not true now, technology advances and the requirements from sites advance as well.
For those the gotcha moments that core presents, and plugins and themes present even more, are simply devastating, especially when you take into account that the clients expects a site built over wordpress to be cheap to build and be built fast therefor you don't have much margin in which you can leisurely figure out a problem.

My prediction is that the dread will just increase (last year it was 68%) as more people are forced to move by their clients from hand coded PHP to wordpress as it is perceived to give a better quality result faster. WordPress core, against the wishes of most developers that actually bother to comment on its state, is actually doing almost everything possible to keep those people in business by sticking to old technologies that are easier to understand.

This situation can actually continue like that as long as wordpress is the de-facto monopol in web cms. You will probably see wordpress gaining more traction and people complaining more about it as long as there is no real competition to it.