Just a point of information, we open sourced Apostrophe (originally as pkContextCMS) back in March of '09, only two months into the project. As luck would have it two other Symfony CMS projects got underway at much the same time. Or maybe that's not just luck - maybe they meet different needs and appeal to different audiences.
I'm glad you recognize that choosing a full stack framework and resisting the tempation to roll our own already represents a willingness to work with others.
It is true that the developers of packages with compatible licenses would be foolish not to learn from each other's work and even utilitize it where appropriate - as Symfony 2.0 will be utilizing Zend Framework. But I think it's unrealistic to start from the assumption that technology choices are the only meaningful differentiating factor between software packages that are, on the surface, seemingly in the same category.
Small groups can often produce better applications when limited resources require them to make smarter design choices - look at 37 Signals and the triumph of basecamp over overbuilt project management software.
@Chregu, Lukas ok, this makes sense now. keep going!
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For symfony I think one of the biggest problems is that the available plugins (not limited to CMS) provide features on a too basic level that is not very helpful in most serious projects.
On the other hand some plugins like Sympal provide too much, where it would be much better for the community when the features were published in dedicated plugins (I know for Sympal the features are already in dedicated plugins but that is only for the internal organization of the code within the plugin). This way dedicated things could be enhanced by other developers who only need a certain feature.
I also think that you can not provide one CMS that fits all needs. But it would be great to have some really good plugins that provide certain features of many important areas like user management, i18n, content editing and so on, so everyone can easily build the system that he needs. I thought that was the intention of plugins. But IMHO most available plugins are crap.
Maybe in the future we'll have some nice Bundles.. ;-)
@Tom: I do agree that small teams can often produce good (even better) results. However in order to compete or rather in order to not have to suffer through using Drupal and friends, Symfony based solutions need to provide a similar out of the box feature set and this you cannot achieve with small teams.
That being said the core work can of course be done by a small team and additional plugins/bundles can then be provided by yet other teams. The key thing is that the end result needs to be a set of coherent tools that can be used together but at will.
