This is an old post I sent to drupal-devel mailing list more than 3 years ago, I would like to revive as I think finally the small core / many distributions idea is gaining some ground. I haven't changed anything from the original post here, http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/2005-November/011428.html
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A "great developer platform" is how I see Drupal, and I'm sure most of the developers too. But the thing is: we need some focus, some targets to agree on.
The problem is: currently we are pretending Drupal -core- to be too many things at the same time, mostly that great developer platform (1), but also an out of the box ready to use community portal (2) or kind of that. And the consequence is we are handling too many issues when fixing bugs for 'Drupal core' that are too specific of some more 'user level, site specific' modules.