You would think so, but how much of your time is that $300 worth.

The way I look at it, Craft saves me so much time, the price is negligible compared to the extra work of a 'free' CMS. If you spend a few hours wrangling some crazy plugin on a 'free' CMS then you've already paid for Craft.

Free isn't always free, and $300 for what Craft does is a huge bargain.

I even sleep better now ;)

I've been using Craft since before it was released publicly, and I can say with all certainty that Craft is the best CMS I've used professionally or experimented with personally.

I've built sites with Joomla, Wordpress, EE, Perch, ModX, Drupal, Statamic, and a few others. None of these compare with the freedom and flexibility that Craft offers.

With Craft, you're not stuck in a WP loop, Joomla content structure, or Drupal spaghetti of plugins just to do something basic.

After learning to swim in Craft, there is not much I can conceive of that would be difficult accomplish. The freedom of being able to add a few lines of code that would normally require several plugins in the other CMS's is very liberating.

As I look back on older projects of mine not using Craft, I find myself thinking of how convoluted those solutions were compared to how I do things now.

Craft certainly is not for everyone, if you're a Open Source monkey who just slaps things together and hopes for the best, you're probably not going to 'get' what Craft is all about initially. But if you're willing to learn some best practices and how Craft is intended to be used, then you will find yourself with the 'god-like' powers of a developer whose default answer is an honest and un-panicked 'YES, we can do that.'

If you're working with any other CMS, then you owe it to yourself and your career to try Craft. If not, enjoy figuring out how you're going to implement all that functionally in the RFP, w/o having to hack away at things just to pull it off.

Simply put, Craft bends to your will, not the otherway around as is the case with most other CMS's