Hmhm: If you’re honest, you will admit that modx too is not so very far from being more a CMF than a CMS.
(and it claims to be just that in the subhead!
) When it comes to handle dynamic data (like blogs, shops, galleries etc) you will need a good amount of PHP-experience to get the best out of it.
For Typo3: I think they are locked in their own universe. I just name "TypoScript" to indicate the most apparent symptom.
(In Germany Typo3 is quite successfull though: it matches the expectation that everything must be bureaucreatic and complicated to be of any worth
)
Since none of us lives forever, learning some PHP is a far better investment than to learn "TypoScript".
Drupal, I don’t know it from using it. The comments I found made me think I’d have to study it for months before getting something which might look like a "result". So I didn’t use it. I do not live forever either
RoR, I think, is MODx best competitor. I just read a tutorial on how to do versioning and user-management with just one quite small ruby-class. I was impressed, have to admit that...
EDIT: I mentioned PHP-experience. But what was of far more relevance for me was knowing SQL! I can hardly imagine how someone who can’t deal with SQL might create something new or great with modx. This argument counts for/against Typo3, Joomla and Drupal too. In fact: how to get control over the data is one of the most essential aspects for judging CMSes. And MODx shines here! (and could even shine more if it implemented access-control a little more clever than building "document-groups" (i.e. a join with a table of that name which (the join) is most likely not done by any SQL-statement you use...)
..Nice to see how close the list will be to this.