A lot of my research over the next few weeks will be into different CMS's. I've already had a brief look at episerver and umbraco. While reading into these systems I can't help but think that providing content management features are achievable without learning the details and structure of many of these (rather large) CMS platforms.

I have, in the past, been given projects whereby my role as a developer must be kept separate to that of an editor (makes sense). i.e. It was my task to develop the design and functionality of the site and my clients' job to update the content. I've achieved this by also implementing a sort of 'portal' on which there were a couple of pages that would accept text input and picture uploads etc. (basically, whatever content they wanted), record this new content to the database and then by design the code-behind would read all this from the database into relevant controls (repeaters for example).

For me, this has been an effective enough way of my clients managing the content to deploy with my solutions. I know that I am wrong - and that CMS's are preferable to those that are built from the ground up - but other than the matter of cost, why?