Agreed, @Neil. My sites are (imo) very professional-looking, and don’t contain stuff just because I can. I design for a very large integrated healthcare system - we have over 20,000 employees and a marketing department with over 50 employees. I design exactly what they ask me to. I’m quite certain that if I used a different set of tools (e.g., Dreamweaver or Visual Studio), my sites would load faster. Thankfully, they do quite well in desktop, which is where the bulk of our visitors still come from. But, the mobile sites - no matter what I do to optimize them, they still load slower than I desire.
As for the CMS at $100 per domain - they are now locked into the 1st one chosen. For business reasons, one of my clients recently decommissioned a site with TCMS built in. At the same time, they purchased a new domain and asked for TCMS to be included (two totally different purposes for the sites, so SEO wouldn’t carry over, and neither would the functionality of TCMS). Maybe it’s just me - but I was very surprised when I learned that it would require a new license (so, I used ECMS instead…which is all they really needed for the new site). Yes - I pass along the cost - but when I mentioned it, the decision maker at the client (who built WP sites in the past), then asked (directed?) me to build the site in WP. Nope, he wasn’t going to pay another $100 for a CMS when he was no longer using the one he’d already paid for.