Automattic loves to remind us that "WordPress is now used on 30% of the Top 10 Million Sites", but these are not "consumer blogs". The top sites responsible for WP's success are client sites made by developers, and they are there because developers liked using WP.

As Pete Tasker of Delicious Brains put it,

My biggest issue isn't specifically with Gutenberg, but with the Editor Focus in general. People may not know that WordPress has a monolithic amount of technical debt in core. By focusing just on Gutenberg for several years, nothing is being improved on this front.

What does this mean for developers? It means to the powers that be, the WordPress user is more important than the WordPress developer. Full stop.
What does this mean for developers? It means to the powers that be, the WordPress user is more important than the WordPress developer. Full stop.— Pete Tasker ⛅ (@petetasker) January 11, 2018

The problem with that approach is that the WordPress user is not the reason for WP's top-sites success - the developer is. And in a high-handed, bureaucratic way, Automattic has been sidelining developer priorities for a LONG TIME now.

Which ones?

Other than cleaning and making more sense of WP core's codebase there are many other things: a fully baked REST API, a fields API, dependency management, getting off of Trac and SVN. There's a long list... None of these are new asks, most tickets are YEARS old.

And we won't even talk about PHP 5.2 support...

And lastly, everyone's just cool with jamming in another JavaScript framework (React) into the core JS libraries? I'm not going to count.

Other than cleaning and making more sense of WP core's codebase there are many other things: a fully baked REST API, a fields API, dependency management, getting off of Trac and SVN. There's a long list... None of these are new asks, most tickets are YEARS old.— Pete Tasker ⛅ (@petetasker) January 11, 2018