Commerce is hard. Making an extensible commerce platform for all/most merchants is even harder. These two reasons are why there aren't a lot of options in the open source PHP-based eCommerce application space.
Redesign (Magento 2) will be released in Q4 of this year (2015). Beta code is available on GitHub and we are accepting PRs: https://github.com/magento/magento2/
> installation was weird
How was installation "weird" when you were using it?
> developing is slow a cumbersome
Speed of development depends on knowledge of architectural conventions, not unlike getting started with Symfony, Zend, Laravel, etc.
> documentation was lacking
I started building Magento projects in 2008. Documentation was non-existent for a long time (unfortunate given the esotericism of the app). We're solving this for Magento 2 by having tech writers on staff and by soliciting community help (docs are also on GitHub, PRs accepted): https://github.com/magento/devdocs
> search was pretty much broken and it was slow
Search and newsletters are insufficient for anything but the most basic needs. That's why there are so many SaaS search vendors filling this space quite well via free extensions.
> on a shared host, performance must be terrible
Shared hosts are never appropriate for commerce sites due to security reasons. There are a number of specialized small business hosts which run < $50 / month. For shops lacking that budget, well, there will be challenges in general.
> Magento is a piece of junk
Commerce is hard. Making an extensible commerce platform for all/most merchants is even harder. These two reasons are why there aren't a lot of options in the open source PHP-based eCommerce application space. Redesign (Magento 2) will be released in Q4 of this year (2015). Beta code is available on GitHub and we are accepting PRs: https://github.com/magento/magento2/
> installation was weird
How was installation "weird" when you were using it?
> developing is slow a cumbersome
Speed of development depends on knowledge of architectural conventions, not unlike getting started with Symfony, Zend, Laravel, etc.
> documentation was lacking
I started building Magento projects in 2008. Documentation was non-existent for a long time (unfortunate given the esotericism of the app). We're solving this for Magento 2 by having tech writers on staff and by soliciting community help (docs are also on GitHub, PRs accepted): https://github.com/magento/devdocs
> search was pretty much broken and it was slow
Search and newsletters are insufficient for anything but the most basic needs. That's why there are so many SaaS search vendors filling this space quite well via free extensions.
> on a shared host, performance must be terrible
Shared hosts are never appropriate for commerce sites due to security reasons. There are a number of specialized small business hosts which run < $50 / month. For shops lacking that budget, well, there will be challenges in general.