I am new here, but I leave my 2 cents nonetheless.
I really like the site that John built, and I agree with his approach. If he asked what the community felt about building a new website, he maybe wouldn't get to build it. And he is just asking for opinions ;-)
As for accessibility, I believe it is a very important matter. IMHO there should not be two different websites. I didn't check John's source, but I think it would not take a lot of time to make it accessible, if it is coded properly. As for JS, the best approach would be use progressive enhancement, adding the scripts and additional functionality if the user's browser supports it.
As for WordPress, I am a WP developer myself and understand the concerns. WP is open source, which is a good thing, but as it is used in more than 1/4 of the websites, it becames a target to hackers and script kiddies. It takes time and effort to maintain, upgrade, etc.
Also, I am not familiar with the multi-lingual plugins so the site can be translated, the ones I know of I don't really like the approach.