Hey great article! It really makes me think about where content management systems are going.
Recently, I am trying to educate people running Drupal 6 that it is soon approaching end of life/support. It's a scary task and I feel your pain! We are already starting to see issues with Drupal 6 not running properly with PHP 5.4. We have recommended that people hold off any major changes to Drupal 6, and invest in Drupal 7 or 8.
I tend to agree with you on a lot of things, but software is always going to be this way. As always, people don't like to hear they have to spend more money on technology. The reality is that computers double in speed every 2 years...so... guess what that means. Yup, new and improved software is released every couple of years or sooner. In turn this requires more complex CMS and web systems. Website marketing people can stay in the stone ages, or embrace the change.
For this reason, I don’t really see the CMS as failing marketing, but rather drastically helping it (At a cost of course). Without modern CMS we wouldn’t have great tools such as Google Search. When was the last time you looked up how to do something at the library in one of those book things? The real goal of marketing is communicating the value of a product or service to customers. - taken from Wikipedia (I found it on Google!). Drupal does this, and it does it well. Drupal 7 does it even better of course , because it’s newer.
If people don’t want to accept change and invest in technology, it is pretty clear on what happens. Dinosaurs will die. They may be happier for not having upgraded but ignorance is bliss. If the website maintenance costs are outweighing ROI, then this is a separate issue. SaaS creates it's own set of major issues and simply hides costs.
I recently came across this article from the founder of Drupal. http://buytaert.net/the-drupal-mood-cycle . It describes the migration path between Drupal versions in a totally unfortunate but realistic/accurate way! Drupal end users are screaming! I am also screaming! (About my blackberry which is now a brick). Everyone is screaming!
Wes