Drupal 6 Design

I've spent some time today dissecting Drupal 6 themes. I've had a bitter taste in my mouth for Joomla and Drupal since way back when I didn't have as much knowledge as I do now. But I'll say that Drupal 6 has a theming system that is far above par to say the least and it might push some more designers over to Drupal Here's what I've learned. First and foremost, my favorite javascript library JQuery is ready to roll in Drupal 6 as part of the core and targeting elements with it is cake. JQuery is light and easy to use. This will give some much better modules for Drupal design. So here's the brief on it. One thing i learned quickly with version 6 is that you must define what version of the Drupal Core you are using inside of the .info file. I'm still not a fan of the block or region system as I'd prefer to put the PHP wherever I chose, however version 6 does allow you to add additional style sheets and sub themes quite easily. I also found that you can now use special classes (much like this site is taking advantage of in wp 2.5 to display thumbs) so that you can very easily override any of the themes stylesheets using the .info file for the theme. This is a big leap forward for those who don't want to write the entire theme from scratch and this will give you a way to manually override the content of each block using php and to add custom blocks. Version 6 also includes the advanced theme settings without the api. I'd highly recommend for those of you who are good with css and don't want to tinker with code or tables with themes.. to install the zen template, which will give you a good base to style with. Drupal has come a long way since I first worked with it in version 4, but designing it is still a bit more complex than the average joe wants to deal with.
And as you can see this site is based on Wordpress and there has been some lame but raging debate over which cms system to use for quite some time... so i'll put my two cents worth in. I have used both in the past and find that drupal is more robust than wordpress from a development standpoint. From a design standpoint though.. I like wordpress as I prefer to have direct access to be able to style with just css and php. But, lets face it.. most online publishing isn't looking at it from a programmer or developers standpoint and most users find design and usability to be the most important aspects of a website project. In the case of larger data sets and multiple publishers/editors there is certainly a case for drupal but from a user perspective wp has it beat with it's ease of use. What i believe is that the structure of the two are essentially (at the root level) the same, using the same programming languages. The most important thing to me is the database structure... clean and simple is better as I truly believe that some of the robustness of Drupal can be better served using entirely different programming methodologies all together..like ruby on rails. Both wordpress and drupal are light and the code is clean, but the database structure on wp can be stripped faster than drupal. With that said... i want my data clean so no matter what happens with any cms platform or new developments for apache and server technology... I can always upgrade to whatever i want to use on as my cms on my servers. Clean database structure will help me do that more easily. I think that some developers get biased according to what they know best and forget that flexibility to upgrade to newer systems is more important than debating our current ones. And for the record.. I actually believe that Python and Ruby stand a strong chance of wiping this debate out all together because of the way that they handle data from whatever type of database structure you want. And it would be nice to see the two working along side one another in a way that would benefit both camps as long term development for either is only going to benefit from a larger developer and designer base.