I've been using Drupal now for the past several years, and my time with Drupal has been varied. What I have noticed though is that there is always an overabundance of contributed modules that have great feature sets, and a small number of truly exceptional contributed themes.

A lil bit of history

When I first discovered this powerful CMS, I was at a small web shop that was teetering on the brink of disaster using an in-house CMS built by a single developer. I quickly set up a test site, learned the basics, and presented it as the ONLY valid option for this web shop to continue down a path to larger and larger clients. It was taken well, and a week later, I was given a chance to use Drupal to theme out a basic site for a client. It was fast, painless, and the client was very happy with the end result. During this time however, I knew nothing of implementing advanced custom features, or really manipulating the theme layer to my will.