In reply to Morten Rand-Hendriksen.

@ Rick,

That’s naive. Gutenberg is being developed because Matt wants it to be. There was no demand from ‘the community’ for it or for it to be the gang feature in 5.0. That’s Matt.

+1. You have proved consistently to be a voice of reason and sanity throughout this unnecessary episode.

@Morten,

Being repeatedly told your work is bad or that you are destroying things when you are trying to make them better is demoralizing no matter what situation you are in. Having someone step in and say “hey, I see what you are trying to do, but this is not working the way I expected. Here’s what I think should happen instead” on the other hand is both helpful and constructive.

Sorry, Morten, but trying to justify your previous comment to Scott with this argument doesn't wash either. Because it means, in the end, that the only people who can legitimately offer critical comments are those with the technical expertise to suggest an alternative technique. That rules out the overwhelming majority of WordPress users.

Sadly, it's also been among the most common responses of those developing Gutenberg.

It's also 100% wrong to for someone to develop something like Gutenberg and ask for feedback, and then to complain when the feedback isn't what the developers want to hear.

In any event, it's almost impossible to avoid making what you call destructive criticism when constructive criticism is entirely ignored.

Here's a prime example. Not so long ago, the buttons on the TinyMCE toolbars were changed around. While this change makes semantic sense, user feedback showed that it was essentially pointless because the overwhelming majority of users start by opening up all the toolbars anyway so that all the buttons are visible before they start writing.

Yet what do the Gutenberg developers do with the buttons? Hide them away until the user clicks on the right place to make them available! What? Are you kidding me?

But that's not all. A reviewer called @angejann made this cogent comment on wordpress.org:
From a UX/Accessibility point of view, it is disappointing to see the block options hidden under a plus icon, instead of utilising the available space (given there is not an extensive number of blocks) and creating a visually beautiful toolbar akin to successful word processing apps.

The response from Tammie Lister is telling:
I’m interested when you say about a toolbar, do you not feel that having everything on display would be too much for users?

No, Tammie. And you should already know that. Fortunately, @angejann remains calmer than many others would in such circumstances, and simply refers Tammie to this.

Well done, @angejann, for keeping cool. But it's easy to see why others don't when even the simplest constructive criticism gets repeatedly ignored.