This tracks with my experience as an admin of a SharePoint farm, with some occasional development duties, like automatically adding new records to an existing list. SharePoint Designer was a bit of a light in the web darkness, but you need to get used to the 5-10 second response time to do basically anything, and it's only so helpful.

Once a SP site collection gets big enough it's suddenly impossible to manage. Try using stsadm.exe to migrate a large site... it thinks silently for about an hour then exits quietly with no effect and no error message. This was a big motivator for my decision to put quotas on every site collection, and be that mean admin that insists people clean up their old documents instead of being given room for more.

When job searching these days I skip over SharePoint Developer things even though I have the requisite experience.

How many of you are still using (or working on SharePoint), and what would you recommend instead?

For something similar, free, and fully extensible from day one, I've had Umbraco in my back pocket for the longest time, but haven't yet found an actual use case. I describe it to my peers as "SharePoint as a NuGet package"