Requirements: a simple installer and a one click maintainer for all! ===
Every legacy software reaches a dead end without its adherents noticing.
In the case of Drupal and WordPress, both decided they had to make an architectural break with the past, with Drupal 8 and WordPress Calypso respectively.
WordPress has leaped Drupal by implementing a full node.js REST model, but it had the advantage of the Ghost fork that did this several years ago. Drupal is a step behind, they decided structured content was more important and were late to the JSON game. Their Rest is a bit of an add-on layer.
For MW, one possibility is to add a MEAN stack in front for content delivery. Use angular to develop a fully responsive/adaptive Web Application.
Use the legacy code for authoring and content management. Add a REST layer to dump content into Mongo at the front end.
Over time, convert the back end to Javascript.
David
mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org