Fellow users:
I now offer praise for EE. I first used it about 2 years ago, and was frustrated, but I see now that I just needed more patience and study.
Since August 2007 I’ve been using it for several small- to mid-size projects, with great results. For me, the key to getting benefits from EE is to learn it well, and to be patient. Its extremely flexible, but the more you want to do with it, the more you need to know.
I think the biggest benefit is the arbitrary nature of custom fields. The fact that they can be almost anything it quite valuable. And until recently, an expensive, closed-source .NET-based CMS that I used in 2007 did not have this (seemingly basic) capability, which required some hacks—fields like “summary” and “comments” had to be used for something other than the intended use. Needless to say, that makes future changes a big ass pain.
Thanks to the EE team for making such a flexible, robust product.