Regarding hosting prices, there are really cheap VPS solutions available. I've been successfully deploying apps in a VPSLink Xen slice at a cost of around 80$ a year (one slice per app), which is not much more than what many web hosting companies will charge you. Something like that makes up for developing in a Smalltalk framework being expensive, and if the websites are simple enough, you can even run more than one in a single image. On the other hand, I still agree that a nice, free, end-user friendly CMS, as powerful and easy to use as Drupal would be great to have and would get lots of designers and web devs to use it over other more mainstream ones. Pier is very nice, but IMO no designer (or client) will like, for example, having to learn its markup language, they will ask you for an easy to use WYSIWYG editor, an easy to plug image gallery, forum, wiki, whatever. A designer can very easily learn how to install a Drupal/Joomla! extension, but we can't ask him to learn how to embed a Javascript rich-text editor into a Pier application... even most of us will run into several problems when trying to do that. I'm sure we mostly agree, but who does have the time to develop something as titanic as this? :( Bernat Romagosa.