I'm curious that discussion comes back to how many modules are installed. Does this imply that significant commercial users are also locked in to a few core modules? We have only the modules we need, and some additional ones which overcome inequities in other modules, like Nat needed to overcome a Workbench-Taxonomy access problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.
41 modules in all, most of which are base Drupal, like Views, Pathauto, token, etc. Users don't have choice on prerequisite modules so I am at a loss to understand the number of modules as a memory issue. I would mention though that a php dev working with us a while ago pointed out how badly some modules are written.
Modules, nothing more than plain text files, concatenate into a homogeneous lump, they don't add much to the over all size of the Drupal operating system, but how they handle and release memory is critical and if the number of modules assertion is true that "many modules make Drupal collapse", then perhaps someone could look into module interactions more closely.
We are in 2013-4 era, with increasingly complex hardware and technologies, Should Drupal easily handle dozens even hundreds of additional modules?
Sad part for us is that I have to set up the site to create newsletters and that means even more modules and possibly additional views. Is this to mean that Drupal is about to have more problems?
Thanks Roger