Separation of content (ie. copy and layout).

The benefit of the classic editor is that anyone can enter text information including headings, paragraphs, lists etc. and then this can be marked up with short-codes. The short-codes can reveal "just enough" information to the content editors that they don't screw anything up. We invested 12 months developing 3 corporate themes for separate websites, along with a group of configurable short-codes and a Javascript interface that our copy editors can use to control the layout inside of our themes. Short codes are good in that there is control for developers who can expose "just enough" functionality for the copy editors to do their job. It will be a significant cost for our organisation to spend the 12 or so months again to recreate this process using the Gutenberg editor for which we don't have a need. Our sites have a few hundred pages with short-codes used to control layout. Throwing all this out and starting again is, from a software development perspective, a ridiculous requirement. Our marketing, sales and support teams can add text based content to our sites and style it within the bounds of what is necessary without being exposed to CSS, HTML or Javascript. I wish the Wordpress developers would focus on maintaining the current "Core" rather than adding new functionality all the time. The included version of jQuery in WP 5.3 has known security vulnerabilities and is difficult to upgrade and patch. The Core team just ignores the tickets raised to fix it because they are more interested adding new features. The "Big Bang" approach to Gutenberg, although deemed necessary by the WP Core team, ignores all the work that WP users have invested in short-codes to achieve things, in what was the only way possible at the time. This is poor design for software because you can't expect people to cover the costs associated with re-tooling just because the Classic Editor has some shortcomings. This kind of re-tooling often fails. I seriously doubt the Classic Editor will be used on less than 50% of sites in 2022 which means it will need to be maintained for much longer. If more people continue to use the Classic Editor than Gutenberg on their sites in 2022 then to me it is Gutenberg that should perhaps be re-thought.