Lets take small time travel... When I was starting with web programming there was nice cms named Mambo. And I thought its cool to have such system where all you need is to combine some elements, like lego boxes, and get running site in few minutes.
Than, in few months, Ive noticed that components for sites are not all good. Some of them are great, but mostly... I need to fix it, with more or less "hummer"-style programming, but it annoying. So Ive started to write my own components, some of them are available here, some were totally sold. Honestly, some components I didnt put here cose they need to be finished to be used by anybody else. I thinks of them as "ugly ones". That was time when Mambo comunity goes Joomla.
"OK, new name - same stuff" - I thought. But Joomla grows, its now MVC style, nice code, a lot of new stuff every day. And where is Mambo? It was announced that Mambo will go CakePHP.
CakePHP is my new love, its perfect for projects where you need to do all by yourself. Instead of using strange combinations of components and hacks - as it goes for all big projects built with cms - I prefer to create full model of application in one big scratch, and than bring it to life in few weeks in one unified programming framework.
So Mambo, cms built in framework, had no chances in my eyes - somebody loves cms, soebody loves framework, all we use both cms and frameworks (different tasks - different solutions). But if you can write for framework based cms, you`ll start writing for framework...
Ive been far from Joomla for last year, and now Im fascinated by great progress of its core. I think its time to go back to Joomla)