the forum in my sig uses drupal. it is pretty simple though not that much to it however, if i put some time into it, the forum would be pretty nice drupal rocks!
pretty much finished the bare bones its in beta now. it is an instant download digital marketplace. moneyfunctions.com I recommend downloading the seo checklist module its awesome for newbies
I have a bunch of Drupal sites, two of them are: photographicdictionary.com giraffian.com Giraffian was my first drupal site and under the hood is a real mess. If it wasn't such a pain to do, I'd undo a lot of what I've already done there and do it better. The users wouldn't see much of a difference but it would be easier to maintain.
You can check out our Drupal site. It gets a ton of traffic and is rock solid stability-wise. Link is in my profile.
there's so many good site built with drupal, you can check popular drupal sites on my site, please googling according to my username. I can't put links here. There also building forum tutorial
You can do news page, forum and blog w/ no extra modules with Drupal. ttp://www.goodgrease.com/ -- good forum ttp://www.keyword.vc/ -- good niche site w/ ubercart shop Use the backup and migrate Drupal module: ttp://drupal.org/project/backup_migrate ttp://drupal.org/hosting Anytime. Keep asking. :0)
Why you guys mention 1 or 2 good Drupal Sites. Just come to buytaert.net/drupal-sites, the founder of Drupal regularly post all large company or community using Drupal as their framework.
They publish regulary on drupal.org the latest sites made with it and give a nice description on how was made too