Thank you for writing this thought so eloquently and completely. I think it's wonderful that WordPress has a relatively low barrier to entry (and so do clients). However, I concur that it has also created a horde of "experts" who claim the title and an ability to build you an advanced site when their feature building has little more scope than installing another contrib plugin.

Unfortunately, I get the sense that this is the main reason Drupal or Laravel are the first suggestions I hear when a customer has an actual CMS requirement while WordPress is relegated to "you mean that blogging platform?" I can only hope that changes when JSON API and Fields API slowly find their way into core.