Upgraing Drupal: Why is it so goddamned hard??

If you don't know, this site is powered by the Drupal CMS. It's fast, powerful, scalable, and overall pretty damn hot. But aside from a few minor gripes (features not built-in that should be such as blogrolls, comment notification, etc etc), I like it a lot. Save for one major issue.

Upgrading an install.

Upgrading an install of Drupal is ridiculously lame. Here's what's involved.

• Take the site down to off-line mode. Not that big of a deal.
• Disable all contributed/custom modules and themes. Again, no biggy.
• Back up all of your modules and themes that aren't shipped with Drupal. Not a problem.
• Back up any files that may have changed, such as .htaccess, settings files, your files folder, etc. Okay, a bit annoying, but I can deal.
• Delete ALL FILES from the Drupal install directory on your server. Yes. Blank it out. So, what happens if you modified a standard theme or module and forgot about it? You're screwed.
• Copy the new distro onto the server. Run the update file.
• Copy back in settings, files folder. If stuff like .htaccess was changed, don't copy them in, but manually edit the NEW files to have the same changes. WTF? :(
• Copy back in your custom/comtributed themes and modules. Re-enable them.
• Bring your site back online, and you SHOULD be ready to go.

This may work for some people, and honestly it's not that big of a deal to do every once in a while. The problem is, Drupal comes out with a new "Mandatory upgrade" every freakin' month it seems. I don't generally like to potentially crap my site out every month.

There has got to be an easier way to handle upgrades in Drupal. The CMS is so powerful in almost all aspects, but then seems like it's got all the grace of a stoned football player trying to ballet at others.

Maybe this is my fault though. Maybe I'm making too big a deal out of it. Maybe I should, oh, I don't know, keep a changelog (*le gasp!*) so I know what I screw with. But either way, I still insist that Drupal should be easier to upgrade.

And add some comment notification and blogroll capability in the next damn release, will ya'?

... Oh god, I'm scared for when Drupal 7 is final.