I'm not an expert but we found Joomla to be very clunky out of the box. You may have a different experience if it was customized for you.
Yap..i think joomla more easy to customize than others Bali Webserver ---------------------------- Hosting Murah | Domain Murah
Joomla is very very flexible and costs less, as compared to other CMS design. If you need a quote, then feel free to PM me.
I would say .. not so easy to 'design' a website unless you know Joomla Templating mechanism along with html css etc. In Joomla, templates give the design to a site, and unless you know where to place what with which particular joomla tag, it is difficult to get your design working. Also, i would like to point out, that if you are looking for rapid publishing of articles along with images etc in a day, joomla is slow ! I had to do a lot of customization to actually make the process fast and simple for my writing team to quickly publish and not take 10 minutes to publish a article. But then again, it is what i experienced and it is what i think. People could differ. And yeah, i was talking about Joomla 1.5