Not really -- they just like to believe it works that way. What the more people chose is based on more pragmatic issues and market factors that "what the geeks use".
And no, "we advice the rest of the family / friends what to buy" doesn't cut it either. We may do it, for OUR friends/family, but in total we are very few, and our friends/families aggregated are insignificant statistical noise to the general population. And nobody mimicks them either.
The "hacker community" doesn't even influence the general programming community (which is like 1000 times bigger). For example, most people use Java or .NET and not Haskell or Smalltalk or LISP etc -- heck, in the ranks of the millions of the general programming community, not even that many use Python. And that's why even in programming circles Wordpress wins 2 or 3 orders of magnitude to all things like Octopress aggregated
What does happen is that sometimes the Hacker community embraces a new technology first. But getting there first is not like "guiding others".
In the same sense that a tiny minority of underground music fans might have liked some obscure band 5 years before it become mainstream. That doesn't mean that they are the factor the band "made it big". If that was it, then the dozens of other obscure bands they like would have "made it big" or close to big, too.
Bloggers left in droves to the only other platform anywhere close to capable enough to handle their needs.
Now a whole lot of people who made money from blogging and therefore had money to spend created a market for developers to learn how to use WP.
The premium themes market, as controversial as it was when it first emerged, further drove investment of time in learning the system and building plugins.
Then, because people wanted to maximise their financial return from their initial investment, WP began to be used for all sorts of shit like as a CMS and eCommerce platform, for membership sites, you name it.
The cycle now feeds into itself: there is a huge market which attracts developers who in turn make WP a safe choice for webmasters who know they need a well supported platform, in turn contributing to increase in market size.
The most interesting thing about it all is that, despite it being such a monstrosity in it's implementation, from a user perspective it's a pretty good system - proof that with enough time and manpower one can, indeed, polish a turd.
