Eh, not my personal opinion but...

That's what we can read in some posts and blogs. So, why does AT sucks according to these opinions?

• It's old style python (read mostly plain 2.1 python) and doesn't use the latest features that came up to Python 2.4 (decorators, misc new style classes features...).
• There's no out of the box support for repetead fields or groups of fields (read "we can't add n files or images")
• AT is uselessly noisy, and it's code is now as messy as obese.
• AT is slow, more specifically for authors, and is a major cause of Plone lazyness.
• AT APIs are sometimes complicated. We use "content.getField('foo').set(content, value)" when Python 2.4 could let us just type "content.fields.foo = value" or better "content.foo = value".
• AT is not Zope3 "ish", or does the minimal stuff to run within Plone 3. And yes, it uses always the old style Zope 2 interfaces, CMF skins layer, nested complex ZPT macros where viewlets could do better job.
• The set of metadata that ship with AT is not really extensible or replaceable though it's named ExtensibleMetadata.

So... Let's KILL Archetypes! Yes, and what else?

Okay there's new kids on the block. There's lot of buzz around good newcomers in the field of AT, like the new plone base contents (see the plone.app.content egg) you can use if you don't need advanced features.

Or you could wait for the promising new framework Devilstick that will let us define the data model with XML.

Just don't forget that if Plone ships with a nice collection of content types, has so many third party content types and rich services, if Plone is often referred as the best open-source CMS, if you can sell Plone based competitive solutions to your customers you just need to say "Thank you so much Archetypes developers".

In addition, most (all?) of above listed issues of today's Archetypes can be fixed in the future without breaking support for actual content types.

Due to so many skilled developers and rich solutions Archetypes is here to stay for years and years. Yeah!