Jon, as somebody who recently wrote a piece on what different stakeholders want from a CMS, I was fascinated to come across your post. It’s really interesting to see a somebody using CMS on a daily basis to boil down all the practical points and present multiple perspective on the issue.

Where things get a bit fuzzy is when you try to draw the line between what of the mentioned functionality should come packaged in a CMS and what could be delegated to specialized third party services. For example, how good of a job can a CMS vendor do when it comes to user analytics or paywalls?

Your dictum on copying Wordpress UI… that is something I find hard to swallow. WP is indeed easy to use and intuitive — but only as long as you accept that the division lines set by WP. For example, what if an editor wants to be able to manipulate the layout of an individual page without messing with a template? Or wants to reuse a certain chunk of content across multiple entries? Or have a single entry for desktop and mobile clients? Or include extra fields in an entry? Then the neat division lines found in WP start to implode and one has to look for a different UI.

That said, I am looking forward to reading the second part.