In reply to guavaworks.

I realistically believe that a large % of that 23% of the web means also a large bulk of orphaned websites who probably still run WP 2.8 or something. The 1% Roy mentions is likely where the best WordPress can bring is. This 1% needs love because it's where one can make a good argument in how WordPress can be a very decent platform.

In the Hangout yesterday it was mentioned an important thing: it's difficult to give contributions to core when it's one single, fat application, not really OOP. It's hard to tell what does what. It scares away people, especially newcomers, who might want otherwise to contribute and improve WordPress and instead go elsewhere. I remember Matt mentioning once that he would like too that new generations liked PHP a bit more than the older one; well current status of things certainly not helping.

I think it's very hard to see it happening, but I also think everyone would benefit from modularizing WordPress. BackPress, aside of the name and its past history, could be an event dispatcher library where one can attach the modules needed (the wp-admin is a module). The WordPress.org distribution would be just a packaged application that includes the modules that make WordPress as we know it today. However this would allow developers to repackage WordPress with their chosen modules or alternative modules. This can make each module more maintanable and rewritten, introduce dependencies between modules, use composer and so on.