WordPress is good for some people, to me (I've been following it for a long time), it's gotten gloated and over complicated. Joomla was the very first CMS I used, and I used it for a very short amount of time, it was awful. I have even worse experiences with Drupal.

Node.js looks incredibly cool, but I have the same problem as you as far as not really understanding objects. I can deal with server side stuff to a certain extent, but if I start seeing error messages, I lose my cool pretty quick. I ran various linux distros for about ten years, and that didn't change me: error messages in a terminal inspire terror in my gut. If I were still actively working on web stuff, rather than the casual stuff I do now, I'd absolutely force myself to be up to date on all of that, but I've fallen behind.

My best friend is also a programmer. One night we were at my house trying to develop an inventory system for our workplace in php. I think both of us detest php, and we spent four or five hours debugging something that ended up being whitespace. ironpotato's tried to get me to look at programming stuff before, mostly application development, I think. I've tried to get him into web stuff before. We just can't get into the other's territory.

Oops, forgot something: I'm a writer, so all I really need these days is a plain content-only website, that's why I use Ghost even though it's still pretty early in development.