Is D6 ready for prime time?

Now that's a teaser! ;-)

Prime-time = "ready to manage my production site, one going public RSN".

Obviously your answer would depend on your specific needs. If you have a well-defined use case, and all the modules you want are stable, tested and well-supported, then of course the answer is Yes. If you are a wizard PHP/MySQL programmer with lots of Drupal experience, then heck, you'd be using D7 now for a production site ;)

But for my situation (ScenarioX), here's my current position, and I'm looking for feedback:

DrupALL v6 will be ready for ScenarioX around the time core D7 ships stable, or maybe even a bit later.

Ah, "What the heck are DrupALL and ScenarioX?" I hear you ask ;)

Few would argue against the statement that core Drupal is just a bare-bones starting point; in fact IMO that's a key reason it's such a fine platform. However it's really the contrib modules that provide the key functionality for most use cases. [tangent] In fact IMO there should be a labeling system (perhaps a process community-driven voting combined with core-team QC?) to highlight "could/should be core" mainstream modules: Views+CCK are the obvious examples.[/tangent]

So I'm calling Drupal as a whole, including a wide range of the most important add-on modules (subjective I know), DrupALL.

ScenarioX includes two key elements:

• A site going into production ASAP. Yes, starting off simply, but with a not-very well defined future dev path. The boss/customer will be quickly asking for as-yet-unknown bells-and-whistle features, and expecting the answer to be "yes sir right away sir" not "weeeell, I'll have to look into that". Hence the need for DrupALL, not just Drupal.
• A relative newbie developer who wants to benefit from a wide base of collective experience and accumulated online documentation to learn from; let all those adventurous "pioneers" collect the arrows, I'll learn from others' mistakes. (see mea culpa footnote below)

Another big advantage of waiting until then, is that the less actively developed modules can be filtered out, as the better-supported ones will have already started at least talking about their plans for D7 versions. . .

For next time around, I'll be waiting for stable D8 before actually looking at putting D7 into production, and so on into the future. Bottom line: I need DrupALL to be stable and well-supported by the community, not just Drupal.

I'm not arguing the no-backwards-compatibility policy, nor advocating lengthening the release cycle (discussion here http://groups.drupal.org/node/1557).

In fact I'll maintain a regular (and IMO frequent) core-platform upgrade cycle, but just lag behind the actual core release cycle by what, eighteen months? I do realize I'm coming from a perhaps corporate-conservative POV - eg I wouldnt' upgrade my XP users to Vista yet (if ever ;)

And finally generalizing beyond my personal situation, I reckon ScenarioX is the norm, or at least matches that of a very high percentage of people considering Drupal. I personally know of several (very) large corporations in my area that evaluated Drupal for in-house use and were put off by perceived instability/difficulty issues, inability to get desired functionality OOTB. . . But they were looking at D6 not D5!

Thanks for reading this far, and do please comment!

PS Yes I know I should be playing on the cutting edge in order to contribute my testing feedback back to the community, but I just don't have the experience level (nor perhaps the personality?) for that. Don't worry, I'll find other ways to contribute - documentation, helping those even more newbie than myself, etc. Perhaps starting with a Handbook page in Getting Started: "How to choose what version of Drupal to use"?