My perspective is that WordPress is too complicated and too nerdy for most real world users. They are usually better off with a solution that is tailor made for their use case. And there's plenty of such solutions. Even for blogging, there are much better solutions than WordPress for non-technical users.
Totally disagree! If you're non technical: wordpress.com - choose site name, create account, make website. Then if you want to grow you can pay for a domain, custom plugins, themes, shop. If you really want to grow then you can bring your data out and setup your own (or pay someone to setup) a wordpress.org instance. Thousands of options for hosting, themes, whatever.
And: compared to the other builders like Wix, Squarespace etc, you're not locked in. If you make a thing on wordpress.com or wordpress.org and want to escape, you just export your stuff in a common XML format. You get none of that with the commercial options.
So, yeh, however much HN likes to hate on it, it's still the best platform of choice for non-technicals to get stuff on the web.
