<start rant>
Dave Briggs clarified his point of view earlier today on his stance on hacking core.

"Agree that hacking about isn't recommended for everyone. The point I was trying (and failed) to get across was that if Drupal doesn't do something that you want it to, you can make it do it yourself, if you invest the time and effort into 1) making the change and 2) supporting it in the future.This is best done through a module, but of course if you are doing something radical a fork isn't out of the question, though that leads to A Lot More Work."

I help moderate an emerging technologies forum on the TechSoup site--a technology for nonprofit company. A month ago, I made a short introductory post on the merits of using Drupal. It led to a discussion that included CiviCRM, upgrades, modules, WAMP, with a link to a good offsite introductory post by Dave Briggs.