In reply to Edwin Cromley.

Seems to be a controversial opinion, but I think the project has been very well managed. If everything was on hold until every piece was “perfectly” planned and discussed ahead of time, we would not be having this discussion, and in many ways would be much further from achieving the goals of this project as we stand today.

That's a red herring. No one is advocating that everything be perfectly planned, but metaboxes are a critical feature, widely used in a lot of sites. They're NOT some minor thing that can be dealt with partially and fixed in 5.x so, yes, approaches for this should have been thought of earlier and while the team might not want to give this impression, it feels like they don't realize just how central metabox support is to a lot of sites.

AS for 5.0 shipping when Gutenberg is ready... do you really think we'll get 4.9 in a few weeks and then nothing for a year if Gutenberg takes that long? I'd LIKE to think the team is prepared to do that, but have we even seen any desired timeline?