inb4 nullnuke

On a more serious note, probably Drupal.

if you want a long term high quality site you're probably better off making your own

Not really. Why reinvent the wheel? A CMS like drupal offers alot of flexibility and has a good community that constantly improves the software. You wont get remotely close to something good as that if you do it yourself.

Because instead of a lot of flexibility you get total control, and as for a community, the amount of php resources on the internet is several magnitudes larger than the amount of drupal-specific resources. And when I say "making your own" I mean "get someone who knows what their doing to make it".

Anyway, honestly I'm just a control freak when it comes to web design and would rather have total control over all aspects of the site no matter what the scale of the project at hand, however from an efficiency point of view you are right... if it's just a normal website with standard functionality a CMS will save you a lot of time.

latest null nuke owns it, source downloads are usually a steady 14 a week,

Well, my question should've been: Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal, PhP Fusion, PhP Nuke, ...

What would you choose and why ? Is Drupal much better then Joomla for example and why ?

Ive tried Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal.

Joomla and Wordpress felt very focused on blogging, last time i checked them out ~ 2yrs ago. I prefer Druapl because of the flexibility and ease of customization.

Drupal is what gives you more configuration options and has better tools to develop custom solutions.

Null nuke 110%

if you use null nuke, the early version of jquery in ./core/ folder is only needed for the main/user/super admin menu bars, all the model popups, bytecalc and auto refresh and other jquery stuff all works in the newer version only