I agree with the first comment. (edit, I guess last comment actually)

Since Wordpress 3.x is moving into Drupal territory, and since you guys are looking for a common project to work on which has a specific use case. Why not create a Drupal install profile which rivals Wordpress in terms of functionaliy. Wordpress is fairly simple to re-create with Drupal, so it would be a great starting point.

I personally would love to see this and would probably stop recommending wordpress to my clients who request a blog. I much prefer working with Drupal anyways, but I feel for a blog, wordpress fits my clients needs better.

With that said, I recently took on a Wordpress 3.x project as an excuse to play around with it. I find 3.x no different than working on Wordpress 2.x. I don't think it's caught up to Drupal at all and is still a pain to work on and theme.

So with that said, D7 wordpress clone anyone? I've been personally planning on ripping wordpress themes to Drupal 7 zen-sub themes as a personal project. I would be willing to contribute a couple theme rips.
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Drupal & Ubercart Themes and Development

The problem I find with Drupal is that it doesn't know it's audience.

As a developer I disable many of the modules upon installing Drupal, especially in Drupal 7.

Some projects I heavily use the CMS features of Drupal and other I use the Framework features. They may not be the best, but I know them, I like them, and they work the way I want them too.

When talking about 'UX' we need the think about the 'U' more than the 'X'. Who is the user, or who do we want them to be? what are they doing? what do they want?

Comparing Wordpress and Drupal... will always result in "Drupal sucks".  At least as long as most primitive use-cases and tasks are galaxies away.  It is true that we need more Drupal users.  But not for the user experience.  Instead, we need them to raise the pressure, on most simple features and functionality.

It is solely about dumb-a** features like building a simple menu, split into multiple levels, rendered in different blocks.  It is about most simple content formatting, maintaining content and references, ensuring access and security, providing previews.  Drupal heavily sucks in the most simple areas.  And while we certainly improved the usability for D7, it's totally the most basic functionality that makes Drupal loose in comparison with other systems.

The reality is that those fundamental functionalities are not bound to specific use-cases, and therefore, also not bound to an installation profile or distribution.  The reality is that most Drupal core developers and subsystem maintainers rather seem to like to work on big and challenging issues, entirely revamping technical structures and behaviors.  Disregarding simplicity.

Drupal itself is the product.  Nothing prevents us from improving, modularizing, and extending it.  Make it suck less, work on Drupal.

I will echo the sentiments stated here numerous times in that I think Drupal's primary benefit is the fact that it IS all these different lego blocks.  With that said, doesn't it make sense to build Drupal's core administration experience as a better lego stacker?  I agree, various products within the Drupal ecosystem have begun to open the community's mind to what could potentially be done from a drupal administration stand point, however that does not necessarily translate to "drupal needs to have a more clearly defined purpose out of the box".  While I agree, if it did, our administration could be better, I think that's a mis-step and I'll outline why.

Drupal's power has always been it's ability to quickly take different needs and provide co-existing solutions for all of them simultaneously.  Obviously no one is proposing that should go away, but giving drupal a default "site type" out of the box muddies the waters about what it can do.  Drupal then gets pidgeon holed along with WP.  Granted, that core purpose is different, but we're volunteering to be put into the box from a consumer perspective.  Most consumers of these various web products aren't really savvy enough to understand the fine lines.  (granted they're not our target audience either, but it starts the propaganda machine, and then we're killing unnecessary fud)

d.o is already starting to provide fully productized drupal implementations like Open Atrium and Managing News.  We all agree there are some hurdle yet to overcome in this particular implementation, but we have a great start.

All that to say this:
Drupal 7's new administration is great.  I was not a fan of the entire idea, but after seeing it in action, I'm happy to admit I was wrong.  That being said, the technicalities of our administration, and the actual administration itself are two very different things.  I think our technical implementation has a lot of very cool possibilities associated with it, but I think the actual admin itself is... confusing.  Our administration is some hybrid of trying to give super users what they want, and complete newbs what they need.  As great of a goal as that is, I think it detracts from the administrative experience drupal should have.  What Drupal should REALLY have is an administration system that caters to the super users.  Then that administration should have further capacity to define and deploy various administrations for the "common" user on the website.  This sort of approach (which I have a number of ideas about how to actually implement) does a couple things:

1.) It provides power tools to power users out of the box. We aren't trying to cater to everyone, so we just need to cater to the super user.
2.) it gives the site admin the ability to provide administrative tools to other users on a role by role basis (or perhaps some other basis as desired).
3.) it supports the install profile ecosystem further by giving them UI to define custom administration tools for their own products which in turn provides a more clearly defined administrative system for their end users out of the box.

Bottom line, let's not muddy the waters further by giving Drupal a purpose other than the box of legos it is.  Rather, I propose we simply organize our administration to be the most effective product building tool on the web.  Other people will create those various purposes for Drupal profiles, and we should be trying to make their job as simple as possible.

Even without specific products, Drupal could do better at marketing itself as a tool that can &#39;build anything&#39;. &nbsp;That&#39;s how I sell Drupal all the time - if you want a blog, go ahead and use WP; if you want anything else, choose Drupal.&nbsp;</p>

The critical issues, as I see them are:

1. Interface

The Wordpress UI is’t perfect, but overall it’s a great experience.  Drupal’s interface isn’t bad (in D7), but it still isn’t linear. With WP, it’s very clear that the two main areas are “writing” and “admin”. Outside of that, there’s lots of extra things we can do, but there are two main things. I can manage my site, and I can add content to it.

1. Context

If we want Drupal to be a product (of any kind) or a more generic framework, I think that first time users need context. They need to see CCK in action, they need to see things grouped together with Views. They need to see a functioning blog, a functioning forum, a functioning image gallery. I’m no internet expert, I’ll admit, but it took me many months to even figure out the things I could possibly do with Drupal! In short, I think we need to be able to say to new users– if you want to build a blog, here’s how; if you want to build an image gallery, here’s how; if you want a community site with 1000 users, here’s how. This is the piece that’s missing, and I think the current way (telling people that there’s 10 different ways to do things) doesn’t work.

Drupal’s strength is in its flexibility – its ability to act as a framework that almost anything can be built upon. But shipping it without Views, CCK, imagecache, and a good admin theme seems to me to set things back. Not to mention the fact that Garland is still the default theme (I mean absolutely no disrespect for the hours of hard work that went into it, but Garland really is an aging poster boy).

I understand, however, the reasons why Drupal doesn’t ship with these contrib. modules, but I think work needs to be done to close the gap. If Drupal shipped with 2-3 front-page articles, for example (1) Making a blog with Drupal,  (2)  Making an image gallery, etc, it would get new users off the ground faster, and would very likely attract more of those new users.