This piece is not particularly constructive. While it's not required for an opinion piece to present the perfect alternative in order to rant against the status quo...to say "Wordpress sucks" and say nothing about the alternatives...? What good does that do?
I can think of lots of alternatives for the OP but all of them have certain costs/tradeoffs that are prohibitive in many scenarios. The OP goes into great detail describe how WP doesn't meet his needs...I'm really fascinated to know what alternative he's considered that does meet his clients need and that is realistically doable?
The author does not understand that if a theme is designed properly, an admin can mark comment as spam without editing the post. In addition, just about every single thing he thinks core Wordpress lacks can be added easily with a plug-in.
You need the CAPABILITY to be able to edit posts to be able to mark comments as spam. Many of my clients want to be able to delegate SPAM marking, but not have that person be able to edit any content on the website.
WordPress has hardcoded these two CAPABILITIES together for the last 13 releases.
Personally, I would create my own fork with this capability
and try to convince Wordpress to incorporate my changes.
How certain are you that you're going to find software that won't have similar problems? One of the reasons I like open source is that I have control and can make changes when necessary.
edit - also, you basically have customers that are saying they have a pain point, please solve it. I would tell them that Wordpress is designed for the majority and there may be edge cases that don't cover their particular usage. If they would like a customized solution, you can do it for them but it will cost x amount of dollars.
Consider this: in defense of WP, you're suggesting that the OP work around broken ACLs by installing a theme which allows users to circumvent the security model.
I can think of lots of alternatives for the OP but all of them have certain costs/tradeoffs that are prohibitive in many scenarios. The OP goes into great detail describe how WP doesn't meet his needs...I'm really fascinated to know what alternative he's considered that does meet his clients need and that is realistically doable?