It is a pain in every sense, I really dislike it in every sense, what you said is the main reason of why I cannot create accounts in the website for collaborating improving the English (things tend to break up), it is slow, painful, problematic, breaking-all-the-time...
I know (almost) every alternative, and there's no one that Elive website can use, but not because they are not good, its only because resources and practicity, in other words, the wordpress plugins & templates resources are simply the biggest one, they just work and you have resources for any purpose need, I dont want to code things myself unless is strictly needed and this is what wordpress can provide easily, so I need to use specific plugins (for example to send the newsletters, and the actual one is really amazing made!), or if I need to use a "gorgeous design template", you have a big repository, just pick a good one and you are done
Unfortunately every plugin bloats the website because loads extra resources even if you are not using them on every page... but that's how wordpress works, the entire thing is bad made (the language, the framework structure, the internal code...), see instead something better made like this forum website, writed in ruby on rails (thousands times much better quality code and internal framework well made), it is really fast, never fails, no bugs, everything just works correctly... but again, with a website like this it is not possible to reach some possibilities (plugins & templates), and this could be also a giant work to re-do again (migrate things / codes to a new structure), @PrinceAMD already knows how much time he invested in coding specific elive plugins for wordpress
I agree that could be better, but is simply not possible, unfortunately wordpress has monopolized the cms world and all the good plugins are made for it
