John,
Ah, the old customised CMS sales pitch. Perhaps in earlier versions of Joomla there were a few concerns, but with the current version, once the site structure is in place, and with the WYSIWYG editor installed, content editing is quite easy for end users.
I have one customer at the moment who introduced a new staff member to editing in Joomla just a week ago - who confessed to having minimal technical skills. Having looked at her work this afternoon, she's used a combinations of article templates and the joomla editor to create about 30 articles in the past week. The fact that I've not heard from her while she was doing it (aside from one syntax glitch today with a plugin that was easily corrected) is a good sign that the answer to your question is Yes!
I'm imagining MagicDust's CMS has some of the following as features: Custom CMS with small development team; Hosted solution so you can't easily move the site to another host if you need to; Custom features may be unavailable easily; No local user group for support;
Joomla gets around this with a large global community and development team; Hosting is seperate to the CMS, so you can relocate if you need to easily; 4000+ Extensions are available, most for free, to add to functionality quite often by just installing something; Melbourne User Group is active, meets on 4th Monday of the month, and with this forum and the global forum, you have access to thousands of experts around the world.
As for picking up the book, Matthias may be able to assist there - not sure which part of the city he's in now for work. I'm sure he'll be in touch shortly.
