MT definitely doesn't have as much community support behind it, and it is a little more difficult to configure. You have fewer plugins and widgets available, but, when push comes to shove, it works.
Wordpress cannot handle high traffic on a front page, so someone wrote wp-cache. Because that fails, someone wrote wp-super-cache. Until 2.6, even if you didn't enable tags, the query that calculates tags always runs -- and that is one beastly query that is unindexed and extremely expensive in terms of query cost.
Then, once you get a large enough blog network, and start talking to it with tools that feed RSS, you have to tiptoe around because -- styles shouldn't be included in feeds, so we delete those. Feeds with character sets other than ISO-8859-1 will be mangled. What's that? a sponsor used a feed with a typographic quote? shame on them, lets mangle that feed. I really like the ever popular -- if an RSS feed breaks in the middle, lets just toss every post after that even if the XML validates.
Wordpress works somewhat well for the purpose that it was intended.... a person's online diary. Once you get upwards of 10,000 posts, the unindexed queries that wordpress tends to prefer (remember, they hired someone from MySQL to optimize queries around 2.3 and 'OMG its so fast'), it starts to fall down.
Not a day goes by that I don't think about what it would take to write an actual blog networking tool -- composed of a single admin for multiple sites, robust feed handling and proper syndication, but, as the day's slip by, there is little time left for that. One client and I have talked at length about what it would take to do it and do it right. Its just a question of time.
MT works right, every time. Whoever recommended it to you knew what they were doing. haha
You might not have some of the latest gizmos and gadgets, but, at least upgrades work without taking the site down with unexplained problems, and even better -- their support team is willing to help.
The team at wordpress is pretty darn condescending when you report issues -- even stating that bugs are actually features. Removing functionality and breaking things is good because its simpler. Breaking Permalinks because noone should have ever done permalinks that way is acceptable. I upgraded my test blog, and in the upgrade, I faced the blank screen (ok, they broke a template - I removed the graphics from the default template and somehow that breaks), I faced the admin cannot log in issue (ok, remove all cookies and try again), I upgraded a plugin using their automated system (that required me to go into mysql and modify a value because even though it deactivated the plugin, it messed up the plugin script name in the autoload section and couldn't remove it), and, during the plugin upgrade it lost my settings for that plugin.
The people answering their support forum do not communicate with the people that manage trac (their bug tracking system). The people in the forum are volunteers and have no real vested interest, nor, do they have any communications with the programming team to verify issues or fix problems. They are guessing and sometimes providing misinformation.
If MT adopted the same pricing system that WordPress had, even with its slightly more complicated installation process, I am sure it would be able to capture a ton of people this week. Because most of you are doing blogs for profit, MT sees that as a professional license and charges money.
Oh, and 2.6 was released with a bunch of broken features and a pretty important security fix, so, you're required to update. But, rather than fix the bug, they disable xmlrpc because that's where the security bug is. Disabling remote posting fixes the issue unless it is enabled. Their reasoning for not fixing the bug? Noone can prove the bug exists even though there are 14000 sites in yahoo that all have links to a Russian Computer Sales company. Even Barack Obama's blog was compromised as was one of his supporters sites. Worse yet, if people take a compromised site's RSS feed and republish, you've now got another vector. Google did blacklist the domain, yahoo appears to have largely ignored it.
Wordpress is not my favorite software package this week.