It's incredibly over-engineered. Just look at the templating system and see how far down you have to go in a directory tree just to make a simple edit on the page. The code itself is too fragmented to follow. A lot of the mental overhead from working on it comes from just having to remember where functions are in the code base.
it made me think of Joomla (you need a beefy server for what seems to be a simple site)
Thank Zend Framework for that.
I can't stop reading it as "Magneto".
I completely agree. It's painful to develop in and painful to use from a client perspective. I used it for some client projects a few years back and ended up just migrating them to spree after getting tired of client calls every time they attempted to update a product listing.
It's the best free eCommerce solution. Not that that is saying a lot.
I used to think that but Spree Commerce is pretty nice. And Rails, too.
It is a successor to osCommerce. You wouldn't say it's horrible if you took a look at osCommerce's source code.
Spaghetti code or not, osCommerce ran on any cheap web hosting plan you had. Magento will eat up half a gigabyte of memory just to show a storefront.
It ran, but it didn't "work". Spaghetti is an understatement.
osCommerce and their codebase being more horrible than Magento doesn't make Magento any less horrible.