In reply to Bill.

The plugins are a huge problem. WP is a blog platform larping as anything else. You need so many plugins to make it do what you want and then trying to manage those plugins becomes a headache. I lost count of the amount of times a plug-in update has completely crashed my site. And to think the devs believe auto-updates should be the default is insane. I guess that means we all get to wake up to broken sites.
Also the business model of the plug-ins themselves is flawed. I understand devs need to make money but the free versions of plug-ins always lock out features; which means you have to hope that the paid version is actually worth the money and does what you need it to do. A full trial would be a possible alternative but that might not be so easy to do.
Frankly, WordPress is too fragmented and as its grown in size and “functionality” its only becoming worse. I started looking into Opencart and I’m hoping it can do what WP struggles with.