No SPAM intended but to prove my point I will show you one of my blogs. http://www.wawl.info I customized it in less then 20 mins. And So I think maybe wordpress is better then other systems if not a best blogging platform.
And it still looks like wordpres ... not to say it is just a little customized freely availible WP theme
So basically the biggest reason why you don't like WP is because you think it's difficult to use? Then maybe you should take some time to learn it, and THEN make a decision about its viability. Going by, "It's too difficult! I hate it!" is not exactly the basis for good judgement, mon ami.
I don't have problems with using WP like I said ... every WP installation looks the same.... I am yet to find one that stands out. And for using it as blog system it is to bloated and not user friendly. For blog/news system I really don't need 1MB core installation .. so I don't understand why people are using WP for simple blog
sNews looks pretty lame, sorry. WP templating is damn easy, anyone with minimal php knowledge can use it.
I have a solution for your problem with WP. Why don't you write down what kind of things you need and what not on a paper. Then think about it. Hire a programmer of code it yourself. Problems Solved. And this time your site will look different compared to others.
In all honesty, before I decided to use WP - I started writing YABP - Yet Another Blogging Platform. I wanted something simple. Then I thought about all the cool "additions" I could add. And the list got longer and longer... Two days later I install WP and have been happy since! If you look at my blog, only about .1% is actually run with WP - the rest is plain PHP.
The size of your website doesn't matter with WordPress. That's why most of us use WP for even small projects. WP installation is obviously very simple and I think was built for really lazy people, not just beginners . In my opinion, with every good CMS, you'd need to take some time to work with its system, whether its the template system for that matter. You can tell that most are WP powered just by the template system because those certain sites have not made the effort to mask they're CMS. Some were well masked and I can't give you any example because they were that good. J/k, actually, there are some wp powered sites out there that looks like static sites from the 90s. It just take a little time to search for them. The template system isn't hard at all. After all, they're just unordered lists and functions man.
I don't think all wordpress blogs look the same... i've seen some of colleen's designs and they don't look like the usual wp themes....