Drupal-powered community system–Chris Pirillo thinks the time is now, but can the geekiness be culled?

This morning I read about Chris Pirillo’s call for an easy-to-use, Drupal-based (I think those are mutually exclusive terms, imho) community system.  I read the first few posts this morning about it (admittedly, I didn’t watch the video, though) and while I think it’s a laudable goal, I’m not sure how easily it can be pulled off.  Here are the early comments and posts:

• We’re Taking an Open Direction with Web Communities: Are You In? ~ Chris Pirillo
• Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome announces Drupal-powered Community Participation Platform, hackfest in Seattle | B. Mann Consulting
• Chris Pirillo’s Gnomepal – Drupal For The Masses
• Pirillo Starts Large Scale Community CMS Project

I can see why Chris choose Drupal for the effort.  When I’ve used it, I’ve been very impressed with its flexibility and power.  It looked like there was little that couldn’t be done with it, the problem I found was getting something done was often a chore.

Granted, I haven’t tried any of the most recent builds (last time I used it was almost a year ago), still the architecture is pretty darn complex.

Drupal experts will say that because Drupal is so flexible is just the reason it can be done.

My concern is that to make something as one-click easy as Chris wants, a lot of complexity has to go on top of the system and that can cause problems of its own.

For all my curmudgeonliness, I do hope the it can be pulled off.  Just as websites and blogs have been made easier to set up, deploy, and customize, whole community systems should be too.