In reply to Paul Shotan.

@Paul Shotan - that is one of the famous excuses for wp and most open source /gpl stuff in general. I get what you are saying, and partially agree. However I encourage you to consider this blanket statement as being only partially true.

I could give a tesla with a contract that you can never sell it, it could break down every 5 miles. It would still be free. I know that's different, if I give you a car and you simply trash it no big deal. No lets say that Elon Musk (sp) gave you a tesla with the same contract - you can never sell it. That would be a little difference would it not? That car breaks down every 5 miles. People can say all over the world it's the best electric car on the planet. That could be true for many people - but it may not be for all.

How is this connected to the issue I was bringing up?

When Andy Peatling first posted about buddypres I got excited (And there was another similar project that code was being shared for) - I started wrapping my head around how excellent it would be to use my then favorite blogging tool with this social network layer added on. Started drawing up design and layout ideas, started sharing with others.

Now if Andy had just released the code and it did not work with future WP updates (or even work at all - which it.. well..) - you could still use that argument - wp is the best, it's free.

However Matt and I (maybe Automattic?) came out in support of BP, put some resources behind it and it blossomed a bit. It became a kind of official thing - although I am not sure exactly what the heck happened with the bp project and Matt and Auto (at one point I thought automattic would put 1% of their last funding round into bp and hire 4 - 8 full time php gurus to get it fixed up for a year).. however it is still featured as one of the first plugins for everyone when they go to plugins-add-new. (at least on my screens, and maybe the repo plugins page?)

Anyhow, if I spent time on a free plugin in the repo and it stopped working with future wp - throw out the "it's open source, fork it, it's free - blah blah' too bad you wasted your time working on a platform with some no name developer who abandons gpls projects...

Since Matt and Co got behind BP I felt it was safe to put a lot of time into working with it. (Trust and faith, and reputation - the difference between me giving you a car and Elon doing it) Developed a couple of sites around it. Spent hours (hundreds) reading support forums, trying to learn things, giving advice on putting other pieces of that puzzle together, etc. (and still do).

See how that "free" is not quite so free anymore?

Now all I am asking is that future theme development takes into consideration some of the most popular plugins. It's a shame when a new theme or other wp decision rolls out and break things - it's especially more shameful when it breaks things that are as closely tied to wp as bp is.

I give kudos to those who work on the bp code - as they have jumped into coding things that changed with wp (like title tags recently) - and they have spent time trying to harmonize things with the last couple of default themes. All the bp webmasters try to keep up.. but things break and we all spend time waiting for fixes, or writing fixes, or paying others to help with things that break with updates.

This is true along the chain of wp-->theme->bp->rtmedia->yoast ->more and more

anyhow, I hope you can see a difference here. My main thing is not to complain but to ask that more consideration is made with new releases in this chain of events that time and time again has left us with sites that don't function as they should.

you said:
"Don’t EVER lose sight of the fact that WordPress and everything that goes into it is still FREE "…………..
No, these things we deal with are not free - not for the devs who spend time and those who struggle to get fixes one way or another.

"and it is STILL the best CMS on the planet.."
Maybe.. for some people.. maybe even most people.. however I think we will see the future including people looking for other ways to create sites and work with the cms they really need, and given the amount of baggage that has been dragging wp down - I think we'll see less and less basic wp installs in use as they have been the past few years.

" I may not agree with the new theme, I may not like it but so what?"
I partially agree with this for most people... most people do not need to like the new default theme - most people will never use it when there are so many other options. However some of us get basically stuck using default for reasons outlined above - and for that it doesn't matter if we like the colors and layout, SO LONG AS WE CAN MOD IT. I hope things will be easier to mod with the next one. I hope there is some documentation for the next one. I hope more people understand it and support it.

"I am forever grateful for the dedication and hard graft that goes into this superb (and need I remind anybody again ?) FREE software."
Me too.. I totally agree - the amazing amount of time this community has spent putting together this powerhouse is quite amazing. I wonder if someone could write a script that would run through all the code, plugins and themes and be able to estimate hoe many human hours have been put into behemoth.

I must say that word free is a bit of a misnomer though - some of wp is free, but you add up the time and resources spent to keep a wp site running, the cost starts to add up. Some may get lucky with an autopilot system that never needs a bit of code changed as updates and bugs and fixes are rolled out... I have on wp site like that... however if I added up the amount time I have spent trying to wp+bp running in a reasonable way, (x) hours * $1 / hour.... well I'd probably have been better off buying boonex dolphin or phpfox that have dedicated teams of people who work to keep all the ingredients of a social cms working together.. not releasing an update for the front page that breaks all the forums and picture uploading - with an excuse of "it's free".

I am glad to see that 2016 has been put on github and the theme directory - hopefully that will help out the major players in checking things for compatibility issues before it is force fed with an update.

I look forward to digging into it a bit and see if it can be modded without reverse engineering a bunch of java and such. I wish the wp themes had the kind of documentation that bootsrap and foundation have.. theirs are not perfect, but there is enough there about all the pieces that you can at least figure out what it does and how to make it do what you want.

ah 4 pennies of random thoughts for ya.. well actually a little more than that, if I was making 1$ per hour :))