In reply to David Innes.

Yeah, honestly, I am more than happy to give Gutenberg its due; there’s a lot that’s going right and it’s clearly a big effort. But there are so many variables in play I am more concerned with just picking what works for a given task than whether or not one or the other might hypothetically be prudent.

Elementor has a lot of bloat, but for me it makes sense, and yeah, there’s a sunk cost in putting so much time into being fluent with it that I don’t want to backtrack. But it’s also more intuitive to me than Gutenberg, and if my brain doesn’t work in a Gutebergy way, it’s less of a complaint or praise about either platform than the pragmatic aspect of, well, I need to get work done.

People dump on the Gutenberg team like crazy and I feel bad about that, and I get that you can’t be responsive to everyone’s needs — especially when that means a bunch of conflicting ideas. But on the whole they seem like they wanna do what they wanna do regardless and other people weighing in might just be a happy accident.

Since more than just the team has to use it, I am not sure that’s a great approach. Even Elementor gets that criticism. You can’t say what category a post is in in the post widget but they have flashing police sirens and stuff ahead of that because they say their feedback is more about design-heavy things rather than more functional/informational stuff.

I have to listen to my client’s needs as well and after however long it’s been it’s not like, “Oh well it’s new and people don’t wanna hop on what’s new.” It’s been there for a while and through repeated attempts people always ask for it to come off. Which seems silly because it’s not like they love the WYIWYG of a classic editor.

To me the problem is less “what can compete with page builders” and more of “this specific way of handling an alternative to them.”

If I can be 5% less performant but the production and maintenance is 5X easier, I’ll take the latter every time. Yes, even when reports and stats come out about sales lost to load time, because I’d also be losing sales not being able to use my website in the way that I want.