I haven't looked at WordPress Ideas for a while. That area really needs a cleanup. Looking at the top 5 shows frustration that was prevalent two years ago, but may not be a good measure of current situations.

No. 1 and the One you're focused on is a case in point that has had modest improvements. They might rocket back to the top if deleted or cleaned up, but I don't know if they would be as popular now.

If you really dig through the idea "Choose a better WYSIWYG editor" you will find quite a few questionable entries that seem almost like shills for some of the replacement ideas.

the visual editor is such a complex idea that completely goes contrary to the purpose of HTML. "Let's edit HTML with... HTML" Anyone taking on that challenge has to be respected or needs medication.

If you actually go out and work with the javascript HTML editors out there, you will find they all have issues. Some won't be as easy to modify as TinyMCE, some are easier but lack a community. Others have so-so licensing that require sums of money before they even look at you. You think it sucks reporting a bug for WordPress, try some of those projects.

I reported one or two bugs to TinyMCE years ago. The response was decent with either a fix or "gohd, idiot, do it this way". There are only a couple others that I would name worth including in WordPress.

The real solution would be at the source... Get the W3C to do a form content type HTML and a form textarea type HTML editor. Then we can blame them for the problems.

Now "Trust me when I edit HTML" from ideas is also complex and part of the over all problem you mentioned. The old double-line to paragraph and single-line to line break mixed with attempts force compliant HTML in WordPress caused that issue.

Believe it not it's caused both in the PHP and in javascript. The javascript is wpautop and near impossible to override at this point without writing a customized WordPress TinyMCE plugin.

To top both of those "ideas", You sprinkle in some out of date or really badly coded WordPress Plugins to the mix and boom. There are few comments in Extend Ideas for both of those that are obviously support questions related to this type of issue.

God, I finished a whole cup of coffee. I've been personally involved in these issues, so I thought I would offer some historical perspective. Andrew Ozz has really improved things immeasurably. It's not perfect, but much better than WordPress 2.0 for sure.

My take on the Demise of WordPress. Just follow the history of ActiveCollab and ProjectPier for a look at a Free GPL'ish project going commercial. That would be my fear, having more sort of commercial things like Akismet and Gravatar creep in.