Quoth Mike Meyer
Assuming that anything that supports articles posted by users along with a mechanism to announce new articles qualifies as "variations on the blog model", what would another model be?
Just more general. In my case, I have content that's not wholly dissimilar from that, but had my own ideas as to how to organize and manage it, and then drupal rapidly got to be more trouble than it was worth. For example, if you don't want that mechanism to announce new articles on the front page, then you can install a front page extension ... but the conflict with the basic design that assumes this structure creates some tension. That's what I'm talking about - sure, provide the mechanisms, but don't build the assumptions about form and structure into that support. So I just threw it out and I generate my own web pages, but of course drupal supports lots of stuff that I'll probably miss someday. I don't know, maybe every web site owner really exactly wants a blog, but since there are a few well established competitors already in that domain, a different approach seems like a better bet. Donn