Is Wordpress really the way to go?

I would suggest wordpress but not installing a lot plugins like SEO plugins.
Thia can harm your blog and make it slower.

No one mentioned the extensive community support offered with WP.

Wordpress is great. Lots of available layouts and extensions you can use. Just be careful some extensions have huge security holes....

If so funny that and stupid that how lots of people think, Google loves it, at the end is just a php database client who outputs html. It may have some robots stuff but that's all. And wordpress is just for small sites and for cheap development, it can never be as fast as plain php&mysql, without its plugins it will be shit.

To give you a clear example, if a plugin needs a file just for one page it will add that file to the wp_head, wp_footer but that file it will load on all pages.

it's easy to use and you can find many many themes.

Super easy to use and so many themes to choose from.