Software is different from a website. You can hardcode most of functionality, not worry about "settings" and template/language separation and just "quickly" construct a simple site. For the most basic essentials, if you are a brilliant engineer, talented designer and efficient coder, you'd be lucky to launch in 6 months.
Working, but not working very well, anyway. It would only work in "ideal" set of circumstances that you managed to anticipate during development. Like, a few use-cases, under certain browsers, without "unusual" actions, with minimal load, etc. In a few hours after launch you'd realise that you need to add, say, "Notifications" feature ASAP, because your users don't see what's happening on the site. Unfortunately, you don't have a modular system where modules can send their updates, so you just put together some quick fix again and call it a day. Next morning you get a letter from site member saying that he can't upload a video. You tell him it's in wrong format... gotta be mp4. That's because you don't have a media converter yet. Pity that the member already moved on and doesn't care. So, you start working on a media converter, but get interrupted two days later, because your site is down. Some pesky SQL query looped and overloaded your server. Not to worry, you just optimise your queries, run some tests, back online. Nobody joined your site in a week. Wonder why.... You try to join yourself and it works fine. You ask your girlfriend to join and she can't. After a little domestic argument, you realize that she was doing it wrong! She used Safari instead of Firefox and Safari doesn't show your captcha for some reason. Must be some JS conflict. Not to worry, you test and fix, teach her a lesson. Back to normal. The guy with wrong video is back, but your converter isn't ready yet. That's because you wanted to optimise your profile photos uploading process and got stuck with it, because your images weren't stored in a way that works with uploader you were going to use. Had to change folders structure, but since the script is mostly hard-coded you have to go through all files and manually re-write all media calls. You tell the video guy that it'll work in a couple of weeks. He moves on. Two weeks later he comes back, but converter doesn't work still, because you also have to work on conversion scheduling and some interface to communicate that videos would have to be processed and would show later. Also, for some reason, stop-shot on video thumbnails is always blank-black. You say "one more week, mate, it's coming". A year later, your site is a sluggish horrible mess, your girlfriend ran away with the video guy and you wish you used Dolphin after all.
Seriously, we're doing it for 15 years and still far from perfect. If you are a good developer and want to write most of your functionality yourself, at least start with Trident and add everything as modules.
