Enough, kids. I had to delete several responses here. Relax, ya'll.
In my opinion (I believe I'm still entitled to that) Otto has demonstrated irritation in his replies, particulalry to Jill in the other thread. Not wishing to put words in her mouth, I believe she thought so too, given one of her replies.
Don't mistake terseness for irritation. It takes a lot more than these forums to get me irritated. ;)
Also, remember that TEXT is a rather non-emotionally-expressive medium. Any irritation you read is most likely you reading it, not me writing it. And trust me, when I'm irritated, I'm quite capable of making it very, very clear. :D
If you take a look at my posts, you will see that not a single one is about modifying anything - they are all about problems with things not working, like inserting an image and writing a post.
In this very thread, you basically asked how to change WordPress to redirect to the blog on login, instead of to the dashboard. That is modification. Okay, so it's a modification that makes very little sense, but still...
The reality is that a tiny number of people who use the web every day...
Define "use the web". Because running a website is more than merely web-surfing.
If you want to run a website, then WordPress is a good package to use. Like any software, it's not perfect, but it works well enough.
If you just want to write for a blog, then perhaps you should use an alternate service. Like I pointed out, http://wordpress.com is a good choice. Mainly because (unlike other services) you keep full control of your content, and exporting from there to a self-hosted WordPress install later is entirely possible.
Now if you try to stop defending for a moment and start listening, you will see that the problem here is that people's expectation of WordPress is too high and the WordPress site should make it clearer what level of knowledge is required to install and run a website.
I'm not defending anything, I'm simply disagreeing with you. I think that the average webmaster, or even the beginner webmaster, could use WordPress and use it well. No, my mom could not use it, but then my mom could not run her own website with any sort of software.