I used to really hate Drupal.

That's probably a surprising thing for me to say. I'm the lead developer of Observer.com and Politicker.com, both of which use Drupal heavily. Observer.com was a very early instance of a high-profile newspaper running on Drupal, and it was built by Moshe Weitzman, a very early instance of a core Drupal Contributor. I saw Moshe most recently at Do it with Drupal in New Orleans where we shared the floor at a case study of Observer.com. After our presentation, he asked me to share some details of my transformation from a Drupal hater to a Drupal lover. I hope this might be of some use to other programmers coming into Drupal for the first time, and to the Drupal community as it continues to mature.