In reply to Matt.

Hi Matt
I thought it might help to give some insight as to why we are avoiding Gutenberg at least for the time being.
We maintain around 70 WordPress websites for clients, most of them built three years ago or more, and most of those clients have little or no technical knowledge - a fair proportion don't even have access to update their content and those sites have not changed since they were built, except, of course, for software updates.
While we'll get to grips with Gutenberg for any new sites (and our own websites), it's obviously not suitable for those that were built a while ago and the risk of allowing them to switch to Gutenberg with WP 5 is simply to great - it could break all kinds of things and there would have to be conversations as to whether we should absorb the cost or the client should pay.
This is why we installed the classic editor plugin (and Piet Bos' excellent companion plugin) on every one of our sites as soon as 4.9.8 came out, so as to avoid confusion among clients who would log in to find everything has changed, and to avoid the danger of sites breaking.

We appreciate that the editor needs updating, especially in the face of competition, but one of the reasons we chose WordPress in the first place back in 2011 was its ability to be updated while the front end remains more or less the same. Some of our sites were originally built in 3.4 (or so), sometimes with an early version of WooCommerce, yet we have been able to update them for years with no issue - a major strength of WordPress.

I hope this helps you understand that this issue probably affects a vast proportion of WP sites already built and why we need the classic editor to remain an option for a good while yet. It's not that we're against progress - far from it - but our market won't stand the disruption and clients are likely to jump ship to the likes of Wix or Shopify if we make things difficult for them.