Has anyone tried to use wordpress+plugins to achieve your goals?, its not bad at all. I find it more easy to modify/extend wordpress than joomla/drupal. I use all joomla, drupal and wordpress on 2-3 sites each. In my opinion/experience its very easy to change/modify wordpress. Joomla is very easy to setup etc, but eats up lots of server resources (I haven't tried creating a theme for joomla yet, with wordpress its breeze). Drupal is powerful but too complicated to understand ( may be documentation is not appropriate). I need a feature from basic CMS which so far none has provided, i.e. ability to publish the content to pure .html files (not just URL rewrite), something like what blogger does. By the way, am I the only one who hates tinymce editor of joomla/mambo (btw : joomla is rebel version of mambo) thanks!
Wordpress certainly deserves a place in this poll. It has so many a advantages and is so easy to work with. Plus it is based on the idea that we (the publishers) publish content consistently over time, and who doesn't do that?
what i would find interesting is identifying the best integrated cms (ie. that has the most bridges/extensions for the more popular OS forum, OS blog, etc.)
how far behind do you figure drupal is? i love the idea of taxonomy (though implementing well is always tough)