In reply to Edwin Cromley.

Most people are not used to seeing the rapid iterative approach being taken where “incomplete” features are shipped.

Thanks, I've been involved in software development since the early 1990s. I'm intimately familiar with iterative approaches as well as more structured, waterfall-style ones. Methodology blinders aren't useful here.

The controversy surrounding the project is somewhat correlated to the management practices involved which are prioritizing project velocity.

Velocity isn't always the right thing to prioritize and when dealing with the core reason for WP to exist (content creation and management) getting it right is FAR more important than delivering it quickly. Why not use an approach like the team did for the REST API - iterate in a feature plugin that's not coupled to a release, get feedback, refine and then merge? Sure, target a desired release for merge, but don't gate that release on the new feature. Why is this tied to a release (and not just SOME release, the NEXT one?).

Look, I certainly hope Gutenberg straightens out and worked great. I think that, if well executed, it has a lot of potential. But the uncertainty around such a major feature leaves those of us building sites for paying clients in a quandary if we use ACF or similar. Do we build a new site that way? What if despite all of this, such sites break in 5.0 and break in such a way that it's a non-trivial fix? What about existing customers... if they can't be upgraded to 5.0 because of breakage, what's the path forward?

That's why the iterative, we'll play with this and refine over time approach is worrisome. There are thousands of us who build businesses doing this and we need to consider whether or not to stake our 2018 business to WordPress over the next year or if we should use an alternative or if we need to lock things to 4.9 and hope that it will settle out.

Finally, to reiterate, the need for first class meta box support is not new. It's been raised, repeatedly, for a year now and we still dont have a way forward. The team seems resistant to the feature plugin approach I mentioned earlier and also resistant to scaling G back to covering only the actual editor. That resistance, coupled with the year long debate, coupled with the uncertainty all of this brings, has me spending time I don't have looking at alternate CMSes just to make sure I'm not caught out if the rosy scenario doesn't happen.