I really fell in love with MT four or five years ago when I realized that the program just didn’t care what you did with it–you could tell it to create any system of pages with any combination of template tags you wanted. I still love creating sites from scratch with no reference to default templates–just throwing bits together like Legos into the formulation I need.

With Wordpress, one really depends upon using and modifying the existing structure with all its rules. For instance, trying to modify the default behavior of displaying text after the jump (“read more”) only on permalink pages was really annoyingly difficult.

That said, some of my discomfort with Wordpress may be due to the fact that I’m not a PHP programmer; it’s tough for me to read the logic on a page like post-template.php, let alone modify it effectively. In MT, the real code is tucked away in PERL folders, while I get a user-friendly tag system to play with. I can see how, for you, having the tags could be frustrating and unnecessary.

I would love to take a year or two off and just learn general computer science. Having real facility with code would be awfully nice.