Agree, and I'd throw in the example of Drupal: the core and a set of well written contributed modules are pretty decent. The rest of the contributed modules are mostly hacked together, poorly documented, half-working garbage.

Drupal is orders of magnitude worse owing to the fact that the design philosophy is to create a powerful CMS that works out of the box with infinite customizability for hardcore developers.

The result of these assumptions is an architecture that has a certain elegance, but is impossibly complex, where writing good modules means having tons of domain knowledge of the framework itself which does not transfer to any other form of web development.

This approach makes a viable framework for a lot of low-budget projects (ie. clients with $5000 and a ridiculous laundry-list of general components), but compared to Rails, Django or other frameworks that focus on the basic building blocks that apply to the majority of web applications the results are horribly baroque.

Django has a nice little saying, "Django is Python", meaning most of what is done is just the natural way to do things in Python. Now there are some really smart people that have wrote excellent Drupal modules but the majority of the modules aren't very good. Drupal provides a lot of Drupal functions that you need to know about to write good modules but technically aren't required to hack together something that kinda works.

I've found it's an even greater issue in Node, while the core library is solid, it seems like _a_lot_ of the people developing the 3rd party libraries are missing some very fundamental CS.

Bah. There's a price to pay for shiny things, eh?

"_a_lot_ of the people developing ... are missing some very fundamental CS." FTFY ;)

Adequate culture can compensate for lack of fundamental knowledge, but Node doesn't have "The Node Way" (yet.) DC taught us what to avoid, but we don't have a strong body of blessed examples or expressed philosophy.