How is Wordpress winning the war?

I've just read the article How did WordPress win? (http://www NULL.majordojo NULL.com/2011/02/how-did-wordpress-win NULL.php), which talks about how Wordpress took MovableType's public.

It's very interesting, and I decided to comment about Wordpress pros and cons. Here's a copy of what I said:

Very interesting article!

Regarding MovableType, I would add its lack of divulgation. When I decided to start my site, I tested blogbosta first (and by the name you can see how I hated it) then Wordpress. Later I tested Joomla and Drupal. I even read about ExpressionEngine. But I never felt any interest in testing MovableType, or considered using it.

Here's my Wordpress likes:

• Its "pretty permalink" htaccess rewrite rules: it's very nice and also expandable (because we can add new rewrite tags for new contents), and it's also more user friendly than Drupal's Pathauto, even though it's damn hard to change something that's hardcoded in core
• Its RSS feed: it's simply everywhere! http://Hikari.ws/feed/ and you can follow latests posts, http://Hikari.ws/email-url-obfuscator/feed/ and you can follow comments in that post, http://Hikari.ws/comments/feed/ and you can follow all comments in the site, to not count other resources' feeds like taxonomies!... and you have it automatically!! (indeed, you'll have trouble if you wanna disable this feature..)
• It's easy to code: just add a PHP file in plugins folder with a basic header and you can include any code in it to Wordpress!
• Its Hook System: from your plugin, you can easily add code to be run (or change content) in many places, while you can also create new hooks in your plugin for other plugins to enhance, without having to edit the original code where the hook is!
• Its widget system: you can add a lot of small content anywhere the theme allows (although most themes only have 1 or 2 vertical sidebar)
• Its metadata tables, that started early with postmeta and now are available for comments too, making it very easy to add new "table fields" with extra data for each post/comment

But Wordpress also has A LOT of weak points, that its competitors are very polite to not exploit:

• Before 3.0 it never had a menu system, and WooThemes' one SUKS!
• Its formatting functions are damnly bugged, and nobody dares to touch them
• There's no core system to support plugins dependancy, making it impracticle to develop framework plugins that can be expanded and enhanced by other plugins, or simply develop plugins with hooks that allow other plugins to tweak them without having to touch their original files
• For a lot of features, you maybe can extend them a bit, but if you wanna remove some part of it and replace by a custom behavior, it will be so damn hard to accomplish that you may give up and decide to live with what's available in core
• It doesn't have a flexible alternative for Drupal's Views, which (together with the lack of a good menu system) stops it from being recognized by Drupal and other CMS developers as a real CMS
• And the biggest of all: the way plugin developers are treated, being blocked from asking donations inside WP repository and not even being allowed to link back their sites in repository and users' sites

In general, Wordpress is easy to use, which makes it the prefered CMS for basic Websites, created by noobs wanting to start in their hobby personal site. Many of them end up liking it and learning, until they become semipro plugin developers or theme designers, and later true consultants.

I'd say that the needs of 85% of all world's Websites are solved in Wordpress, while 10% of the other 15% are worthier to be solved by a Java/Zend/CakePHP custom solution, instead of an existing CMS. So, why would somebody master another CMS to work on the niche of the other 5% websites?

Then, as Websites grewed in the last years and will start growing in the next, Wordpress (and blogbosta and a few other self-hosted solutions) becomes the first option tried by noobs, which find tutorials and communities to help them, and stick in Wordpress.