Don't confuse Drupal core with Drupal out-of-the-box, please.

For months, the Drupal community has been confusing two issues: smallcore, which I see as a lightweight Drupal kernel and Drupal's out-of-the-box capabilities as a product.

From experience with a variety of software firms, I feel that these goals may overlap slightly, but they're incompatible in the long run. And yet, both of these are important objectives for the future of Drupal.

Drupal needs to have a truly stripped-down kernel that's a framework for future applications like Open Atrium. The simpler it gets, the greater variety of applications that can be built with it. However, that's an issue that's utterly independent of usability.

Usability often depends on mental models, user interface, and all sorts of abstractions that lie upon the kernel in a software application. They're overhead, and they may even have a cost with regard to machine performance. In the long run, they're a different objective from small core.

By necessity, I see Drupal moving towards a separation of a core framework and a highly usable base install. Drupal's kernel should be an elegant framework that's wrapped in an elegant UI -- but that UI should be able to be tossed at the drop of a hat.

The Drupal community has historically used the terms "Drupal core" to mean "default Drupal installation". This really should stop: it's just confusing two very different needs with poor semantics.