The worst part of this whole fiasco is the mixed messages we get from the Gutenberg team.

Matias wrote his famous "Ship of Theseus" post, saying:

It doesn’t seek to remove existing functionality—shortcodes still work the same way—but introduce new ways of interacting with the content. It is an attempt at improving how users can connect with their site in a visual way, not at removing the flexibility and power that has made WordPress thrive. There might be a time when the old ways become obsolete and disappear, absorbed by the richer and clearer interface of blocks, but we are doing as much as possible to make this a process. The old doesn’t have to disappear suddenly, it can be gradually shaped into the new.

But then current design lead, Tammy Lister, says this in a thread on GitHub:

One of the big issues with WordPress in the past from a design perspective has been a spiral of small iterations on top of small iterations. Whilst it works for the first few, over time it adds up to an experience held together with patches of improvements. There's a lot of WordPress that suffers from this. Editor is one, media is another and there are a whole lot more able to be pointed to.

Gutenberg has given us space to remove the patches, to look at what we have and build up again. It's given us as a result the start of a strong visual language to move into Customization and beyond. To actually have a visual language that moves WordPress forward into the next 10 years. Yes, we have to think that far ahead.

These two views are completely at odds with each other, and to those paying attention to the project, with an eye towards how it will hurt their livelihood, the overall impression is a lack of common, systemic values across the Gutenberg team.

All this, with the continued confirmation that Gutenberg WILL be in 5.0 is simply exhausting. If there is no possibility of failure, then how can any outsider reasonably expect their input to be heard? Very few plans survive first contact with reality, and the Yoast proposal is a good compromise, with room to expand in future versions, but if there is no way for the Gutenberg team to fail to merge, then why should they feel the need to take a scaled back approach seriously?

As for me, I'm not so worried about WordPress being irrelevant in 5-10 years. This whole process has me re-evaluating the platform that i love NOW.