At present DNN definitely leans towards defined content managers / admins creating sites rather than end users creating their own experience.

The stumbling-block when attempting to go the "user-created experience" route in DNN is that, by default, you cannot grant page edit rights to a user (to allow module placement) and also restrict what installed modules are available to be added to the page by that user -- i.e., the user will have access to the same set of installed modules that admins do for that portal (I talking "desktop modules", not "admin tab" modules). 

Example:  You may want to allow users to add calendar modules, blog modules, guestbooks, etc, while restricting them from adding and using admin-geared modules like XMOD or SQLView or the like.  Currently you can't make such a restirction from the default DNN featureset.

-mamlin

Mind you that in DNN 5 (rc2 is available for download), there are a couple of new features that might be useful here:

• deny permissions on every permissions grid
• the usage of modules can be restricted per role and per user
• admin modules are normal modules now

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Ah -- I forgot to note that my comments were only with regard to "DNN versions 4.x" which constitute the latest "released" DNN versions.

I'm looking forward to making use of the new features to be offered in DNN 5.x (once it's officially out and has had a few bug-fix follow-up releases under its belt).  Until then I'm quite content to wait things out with 4.9 and let the core team get things in order for a good launch of 5.