I am slowly learning about the drupal way it can take a long time depending on your backround and level of committment / available time ... Black Mountain sepeck's "experiment on the internet" has a great article on figuring out drupal..

Drupal is not a CMS in the traditional sense. Not in the vein of Nuke and it's descendants and cousins. Drupal's origins were not in managing content, it was in managing communication. This is an important distinction. Drupal originated in managing communications with people and experimentation.

From the history page, Drupal was a message board that evolved into a web technologies experiment.

The motivating factor was to enable others to use and extend the experimentation platform so that more people could explore new paths for development.

It's development path has been an on going evolution since then. One of the things people most seem to over look is the power of it's simplicity. Drupal is not a CMS out of the box. It can be a usable CMS out of the box with just core, but it is not meant to be. It is meant for you to take the core toolset API's and for you to add to it, to customize it, to make your own site and community interest group. One that fills your needs with no requirement to link to Drupal.org, no need to use features that you don’t need. Does your group need a GUI editor or a simpler solution? Rather than have one solution decided for you, you can pick the one for your end user population. You have that choice. That is what keeps Drupal core small, focused and resilient.