Creating a dating site: Drupal vs Joomla

I've been around the CMS block a few times. From more "old-school" solutions such as PHP-Nuke, PostNuke, and their ilk, to Wordpress, Joomla, and now Drupal. I'm always looking for something better, easier, slicker, nicer, and more powerful yet easier. And I think I've found that in Drupal. However, Joomla's got some pretty nice features and capabilities as well. Although both seem to have one glaring omission in their power and flexibility: social dating sites.

I've regularly thought of setting up some sort of dating site, in various niches, but the execution's always been the tough part. I have some experience in community sites, my last such project was an art community for the Sacramento art gallery I worked for. Very fun project, but lots of hurdles, and that wasn't even involving relational connections between members. For that project, I used Joomla, and it worked alright. Joomla's definitely powerful, but not perfect.

Drupal has a lot of potential as well, but it seems to be at a lower level, app-wise. Drupal is definitely a coder's CMS, and as such has a lot of modules (Views, CCK, etc) that allow you to basically rewrite how you want the CMS to serve up pages and content. That's something I haven't delved into yet. It probably looks more scary on the outside looking in, but it seems to be a lot to tackle. However, lots of sites are using Drupal in what seems to be ground-up implementations if you don't know better. Rockband's community site is one example. The ability to show your rockers, your bands, your friends, blogs, pics, and more are all made possible by Drupal 5.x (at the time of this writing--it may be upgraded to 6.x when Rock Band 2 hits this fall. They have a TON more secret stuff planned this time). So the potential's there, it's just going to take some finessing.

Most "dating sites" I'm seeing that are currently running on Drupal aren't that elegant, they all follow pretty much the same pattern, and just don't seem as "unbloggy" as they should (I know, I made that one up). Drupal can be pretty customized, it's just a matter of how much work you want to put into it.

However, Joomla has one powerful add-on in it's corner: Community Builder. CB is a huge project with it's own plug-ins that enable all sorts of community/social-type "secret sauce" to be poured into the site. I used CB for the member functionality on the art project, and it was a life-saver. That being said, it's still pretty rudimentary, and changing it around and having CB interface into other non-CB compatible modules can cause some bugs, or even site breakage, so it's not perfect.

So at the end of the day, I'm sitting here in a complete toss-up as to which one to use, which one to go with for a dating/social/community site. I like Drupal's implementation much more than Joomla's (Joomla's pretty spread out back-end-wise), but I know that a lot of what I want is readily available in Joomla.

Have you experimented with dating/social sites on these platforms? Your positive and negative experiences would be appreciated, and I'm sure that I'm not the only one who is curious. If you have an opinion, feel free to post it here.