I get needing to have command line skills for a web framework upgrade (doesn't seem like an unreasonable expectation to me), but why on earth would an upgrade require writing your own code?
Drupal 7 was useful enough on its own and with regularly supported modules that most folks who used it never wrote code. Most smaller folks who used it just dropped the files on a shared web host via FTP or similar and ran with it.
Modern Drupal is more geared towards coders rather than smaller folks. And the modules suffer from slower updates with the smaller community around Drupal than there used to be. So you'll likely have to use your own custom coded modules or have to code the updates for the existing ones when you upgrade Drupal over time.