Excellent writeup and a great analysis of my article and the other work that has been done and published on the subject. I am appending a link to this article in mine as suggested further reading.

To some of the points: My intention is not necessarily to insist that a forked approach is the only way to go. It is rather to kick off a renewed discussion about where WordPress is headed and more importantly what the goal is of WordPress as a whole. I guess in some way the idea of a fork is distracting from this main point so let me clarify:

My main beef with WordPress right now is the same issue Ghost is hoping to solve: It's way too complicated for the novice. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. There is also a lot of effort being put into elements that may not have as much user appeal as they seem. One prime example is the new Post Formats UI. Having discussed this at length with users, developers, UX designers, designers, and everyone in between I have been hard pressed to find anyone who needs or even wants this new feature. It seems to be a feature desired by core developers but not necessarily wanted by the people who actually use WordPress. I may be wrong or my polling data may be off, but it's a strange focus of energy, especially when the much more useful update to Post Revisions was put aside.

Likewise the development of MP6 seems less of a demand from the users and more something the core developers themselves want.

Now before you get me wrong here: I appreciate the work and the time put into these things, but from my perspective what matters is the person at the other end of the chain who actually uses WordPress in the real world. Post Formats produce weird questions like "Do I click the Video button when I want to add a video to my post" while MP6 requires retraining of everyone who uses the application. That's fine for casual bloggers, but in an enterprise environment where hundreds of people work on a highly customized install it means hours of retraining and endless questions from IT and management about why everything looks different and why the weird media buttons don't work the way they should. Think of the backlash Microsoft faced when they switched form "old" Office UI to "new" Office UI and you get the idea.

To me the primary focus of WordPress (and any other application for that matter) is to meet the demands of the end user. And like I said, the end user of WordPress is not homogenous. Just like there is a PhotoShop Elements to PhotoShop, an iMovie to Final Cut Pro, and a Windows Home Edition to Windows Enterprise, there should be a WordPress Blogger to WordPress CMS.