I feel somewhat similar.

I like how easy it is so get started with wordpress (PHP environment + famous simple "installer") and I find it's popularity staggering (very high proportion of ALL new websites)

However, after making custom themes and modules, and trying to hack others, and doing a fairly lengthy performance review I must say I intensely dislike it from a development perspective, particularly the architecture (or comparatively lack of).

I have a vision of a clean, well written and architected MVC blogging platform that is a joy to use for both users and developers.

It would have to be PHP/MySQL (simvla is Rails and unfortunately this just cuts off most of the market), I would use an established framework (CakePHP would be my preference).

I have been debating for about 12 months just writing it (possibly forking wordpress to help the core developers follow my decisions) but I know adoption would be governed by users, and do they want to change? No!

I've almost resigned myself to the fact that no matter how good my intentions, it would just end up another "snail after a storm"

I feel it would be easier to write from scratch than to fork Wordpress.

I share your dislikes of Wordpress though, and decided that writing a blogging platform myself was simpler than trying to hack Wordpress into doing what I wanted.

Personally I tend to stop reading wp-svbtle websites (and I've seen others say the same thing). Whilst many, like yourself, use it because it's nicely designed, to me it feels almost like the blogger is trying to deceive the reader. I like the look of Simvla because whilst the UI is still very similar and minimal, it looks different enough.

Is it really deceptive when only a handful of people (HN readers) even know what Subtle (did I spell that wrong?) is, and they can tell the difference immediately, despite the identical layout?

Not really, no. I'm not saying it is. It's just my immediate reaction and I've heard other people express the same feelings.