In reply to Gary.

I can't say I'm surprised about how polarizing the issue of community feedback and the Customizer has become. I think it has to do with a fundamental misunderstanding of how and why core decision-making happens.

Part of the confusion I think lies in the difference between need vs want. Core decision-making happens based on what the perceived needs would be for 80 percent of the user base – many of whom just want to publish content in an easy way and don't care about the nuts and bolts.

So it's not that the core team isn't listening, it's that the feedback they're getting much of the time often isn't 1) constructive or informed, 2) keeping with future development in mind, and/or 3) what would be considered useful for that 80 percent of users.

In the case of this ticket, the author proposed a solution without really outlining the problem. And that's nothing against the author, but in a world where we're developing software used by nearly a quarter of the internet, problems should be defined before solutions whenever possible.

In this case, the problem is: "I don't want my users to see the Customizer because it's too complicated/slow/confusing."

Core developers responded in-kind to the problem with the best future-proof solution currently available: capabilities. We know how capabilities work now, and likely how they'll work in the future. This is an important distinction to make.

Due to the backward-compatible nature of how WordPress is developed, the core team has to consider not just how something will work for core, but also how it will be extended by others (like theme and plugin developers) now and in perpetuity. Adding a filter in this context means that the filter must be supported in perpetuity.

And if you consider the vision for the Customizer posted on the core development blog a few weeks ago, the time for consolidation of the legacy Appearance screens isn't now, but we need to consider that someday it might be.

All of the above is to say, boiling down the response to "the core team isn't listening, let's fork WordPress" is to drastically oversimplify what's going on. It also isn't particularly constructive.