In reply to Rick Gregory.

Is there the equivalent of a product manager on this? Because it sure as heck seems not and I’m starting to wonder about the rather startling naiveté around things like the use of metaboxes.

Yes there is a Design Lead, Tammie Lister (formerly Joen Asmussen), and a Technical Lead, Matías Ventura. Gutenberg is an ambitious project. Under their leadership and management, Gutenberg has come a considerable ways in a very short period of time. Not everyone approaches product management the same way, and it is hard to be everybody's cup of tea. The controversy surrounding the project is somewhat correlated to the management practices involved which are prioritizing project velocity.

Most people are not used to seeing the rapid iterative approach being taken where "incomplete" features are shipped. If we step back to the beginning, many people complained about the lack of stable saving, or use of standard WordPress settings, or oddities in the writing experience. There are far, far less complaints about this now, and the same will be the case for meta boxes. It is all just a matter of time.

This is dangerous thinking and Hoffman is right. If this is allowed, WP 5.0 CANNOT be present as just another dot release upgrade. Doing so will break sites and if Matt/Automattic are seeing Gutenberg as a way to maintain and increase market share, they’ll be doing the opposite.

To clarify, when anything is changed, it is potentially a breaking change. There is no concerted effort to break sites, in fact any breakage is actively being minimized to great extents. I do not share your same level of foresight, but it would probably be even more tragic if Gutenberg was not a project widely available for all WordPress users. Rather than looking at Gutenberg as it is in this instance, look at its track record of improvement and acknowledge that it is heading in a positive direction.