In reply to KTS915.

The problem is that the core team think they have a monopoly of vision.

It takes a community to innovate, and WordPress is indicative of that. One of the key purposes of having lead developers is so they can define the vision for the future of the project – and they have. That involves making decisions that weigh the perceived needs of the many with the few.

It's true that of late there have been a few instances of contributors lacking tact in how they address feedback, but I don't think it is fair to characterize the entire core team as arrogant as being shut off from the community – a community, mind you, that we're all members of. Concerns are not going unheard, in fact, many of them are already shared by active contributors.

I think a lot of the vitriol we're seeing of late stems from a feeling of disempowerment, and of being ignored, something I think we can all work harder at addressing. This isn't a power struggle, the point is that there is a process for how core decision-making happens, and getting actively involved in that process is the way to affect change. Armchair criticism and hyperbole are one thing, action is another.

Write a blog post. Write a plugin. Build a movement behind your ideas and help the project innovate through the community at large.

And please don’t attempt to justify the Customizer with talk of what it might become. If it’s going to be so great, then develop it as a plugin until it’s ready to wow us all.

As usual, context is important. If the Customizer were to be proposed today it would absolutely be developed as a feature plugin. Larger features going into the Customizer have all been conceived as feature plugins themselves, namely, Widgets, Menus, and the theme switcher. Of course, the problem we have is that that the Customizer itself was introduced before the feature plugin development process was conceived. So the next best option is to continue to iterate and make what we have better with the resources at our disposal, which I think is largely the message that the project leadership is sending.

WordPress is never going to be all things to all people, and that's OK. In my opinion, the best possible things we can do are try to make WordPress as simple and robust as possible, while allowing for flexible extension. I think that's what we're constantly striving for, but in a community of volunteers, change doesn't happen overnight.