I am building only my second Drupal site, but I have already concluded that image related modules in general in Drupal are a dysfunctional mess. The first drupal site I made, it took me quite a few hours to get image upload in conjunction with a wysiwyg editor to work. The site I am working on currently, it took me a day to set up an image field in a node that worked properly. Then I tried to install some/any slideshow module. I gave up in frustration after a long day and a half of work, trying three different modules. The worst part is that something I did broke the image path that was being assigned to the node_image field, and I have now spent an unsuccessful day and a half trying to debug that problem. It has been a nightmare. As far as the slideshow goes, I ended up hard coding a slideshow script in page.tpl.php. It worked fine, and took all of 15 minutes to do. I do have a certain amount of experience with both PHP and javascript, and I think that experience has shown that I am not a total incompetent as a web developer. If I have so much trouble getting these modules to work, what chance does a non-programmer have?
In theory, the modular bootstrapping approach that Drupal uses is brilliant. As a practical matter, it has serious flaws. In the case of the image modules for example, they use dependencies that rely on dependencies, that rely on dependencies, and a problem or version change in one module in the chain can break several other modules, and many of the modules are poorly maintained at best. I believe also that the Drupal policy of attempting to conceal and separate all code from the user, at any cost, has been taken too far, and the artifices that have been instituted to hide the code from the user have actually become way more difficult, complex, and problematical, than simply modifying the code as needed. I personally will be hard coding a lot more functionality and bypassing the Drupal module system because it has simply become unworkable in many cases.
