Joomla

Nop, Joomla is very easy but its mainly good for corporate and product type sites only. For niche or blog Wordpress is the best

I built my first site about 6 years ago and used joomla. I believe it can be just as search engine friendly as other cms or blogging platforms like wordpress. joomla has a lot of seo plugins like sh404sef for pretty url's. I think it is much easier to manage category structure with joomla. You also have module flexibility with joomla. Meaning you can vary the template and widgets shown in the sidebars based upon category.

So to answer you question, I am no longer using joomla because it is not the right choice for my sites

joomla is good for professional websites. I have a couple of joomla sites that do well.

I use Joomla pretty exclusively, and no I don't think it's hard to set up correct SEO on it.

Some things to note that you might want to change from the out of the box settings:

Not a great page speed on most free templates but nothing you can't change with a basic knowledge of CSS. (I build my own templates which takes an hour or two).

SEF URLs, I use sh404sef as mentioned by motron, and I use .htaccess rewrites.