The conversation that never comes to the surface in regard to many WordPress controversies is the fact that these ideas and decisions are largely due to Matt Mullenweg and Automattic being primarily concerned with monetizing WordPress.com. In fact, one could argue the entire Gutenberg concept started when Medium.com began growing rapidly and stealing some Silicon Valley limelight, causing Mullenweg to panic and look to outshine them.

That's all fine, but when you are the gatekeepers of the world's most popular open-source platform, it raises some issues.

Most notably, the typical user at WordPress.com is clueless when it comes to web dev, whereas the entire reason Wordpress.org has become so popular is because it is simultaneously simple yet powerful, meaning not just post-editing, but an entire CMS.

Now that Medium.com is "dying" and many publishers are returning to the WordPress.org world (as recently reported), it would behoove the Mullenweg crowd to consult more with the community as this could be the straw that breaks the camel's back and results in a fork of WordPress that splits the community in half.

Perhaps a parallel story is that Google just decided to permanently remove their "instant search" in favor of the traditional search method that requires manually clicking. The obsession with javascript (etc) in the past few years with things like Infinite Scrolling and now Automattic's Gutenberg are ultimately trends, but if WordPress goes this route the damage could be forever.

For a company that emphasizes compatibility -- even continuing to support PHP 5.3 a decade later -- this is truly bizarre.