My latest project is overhauling a WP site my company outsourced to a local "development" company. Why is development in quotes you may ask? Because their idea of development is about 30 plugins and minor changes to a theme. The only saving grace here is that they used a child theme.

I can't stand all the plugins. There are a couple that I use religiously, but everything else I figure out how to work into the custom theme functions. Anything client specific anyways. Would everyone please stop leaving SEO blindly up to a Wordpress plugin that isnt anywhere near up to google's standards?

I like to minimize the use of plugins but I also don't like to reinvent the wheel. I have a set of plugins I use on almost site and then some for specific site features if it just makes sense for the project. When you get to the amount of plugins this site has, it's the sign of a new developer or, worse, a lazy one. What's the point of being a developer if you can't actually create features but rather just write enough code to string together plugins?