Gosh if you can show me a system that non-technical people can install, load up with plugins, and start building sites with right away, I'd happily start telling people about that instead.
These days, for the audience Wordpress serves, there is no competition. Not even close.
I have had the exact opposite experience. As long as you install one of the common security plugins (and not much else), then you're fine. And all those plugins do is ensure things like strong passwords and auth retry lockout.
A large part of the problem comes from the many, buggy plugins you can one click install from within wordpress.
While that is mostly true, the amount of available plugins is one of the main selling points of WordPress. So if you have to avoid plugins altogether to stay safe, or don't need the plugins to begin with, you're probably better off with something saner (like bolt CMS).
People (product, marketing, and so on) also always demand to install plugins (usable multi-language support, "SEO features" and all kind of things).
Oh, and you'll also need some kind of caching plugin, because all that plugins are making it insufferably slow.
And you want to keep it up to date (and plugins!) and fast, because security issues and worms taking advantage of it always lurking around the corner.
I've got plenty of bad experiences with WordPress. In my opinion, in the long run we would have been better off with our own custom solution (we maintain our own proprietary PHP framework anyways, and we had code that would have covered most of the requirements. Management will always insist on WordPress for "saving time").
I'm snobbish about Wordpress too, but it also keeps obnoxious web marketing people out of my hair and busy with their site. Long as they don't go too overboard with plugins....
