>There things that annoy me, to the point of not using it anymore.

I've been really happy with DNN, but it can be frustrating.

>1) The difficult, flakey, poorly documented upgrade path between versions

Upgrading is definitely flakey. Did you get the book DotNetuke 4? It does a much better job of explaining the upgrade process. Also for me, www.dnncreative.com has been extremely helpful. I was lucky in that my first upgrade from 3.3.2 to 3.3.7 went fairly smoothly.

>2) The websites go to sleep and take 8+ seconds to wake up

I use a free service from www.host-tracker.com that keeps the site alive.

>3) The lack of an elegant built-in skin

It's true that the skins aren't pretty, but there are a lot of decent looking skins out there for sale.