In my experience, a CMS is a great way to modularize, standardize and manage a site or set of sites — all benefits… if you’re a Web professional! For non-Web pros, a CMS most often represents additional duties for which they are unprepared, either in time or training and usually both.

I like your analogy of the restaurant. Sorry, but I’ll be stealing that in the future! To precariously extend that analogy, most of the food in the walk-in will go past its expiration date before anyone gets around to taking it out and putting new food in. It will start to freezer-burn and smell. It seems that about 90% of our CMS “content contributors” never get around to contributing any new content, ever. They weren’t hired as Web editors, and a day or two of CMS training won’t convince them that suddenly, they have magically become Web editors. And they certainly won’t magically gain the Web editing work-hours beyond their other duties.

You mentioned text, and for sure it seems no matter what strictures are put on CMS users, they WILL find a way to supersize their fonts, blast their text with red and bold and underline, and they’d it too if they could! What they WILL NOT do is suddenly become better writers.

Even if CMS users do add content, the chances of those users being good writers, let alone good Web writers, are small. After all the well-written print brochures have been transcribed onto Web pages, someone needs to come along and keep it fresh. And if it’s poorly written, it ain’t fresh.

I think it’s often overlooked that many Web editors are good writers. The Web remains primarily a verbal communication medium, after all.