In reply to Kevinjohn Gallagher.

IIRC you know much better then this dribble indicates

1. 2016

since 2011 or was it 2012, default themes were just a default. pointing at 2016 and shouting meh is like discovering the sun rises at the east.
OTOH 2013 had a bold design and no one used it.

2. Plugin directory

The aim of the plugin directory is to be index for plugins and ensure their availability by not trusting the developers to keep hosting them indefematly.. Have you tried to search for themes on themeforest? your complain is like saying the internet is pointless because it is full of junk.

3. Menus

Users are idiots and prefer the illussion of control that comes with having many options (illusion because to be able to actually be in control you need to invest the time to understand all of them).
Core is very clean, the clutter is a thing that users infect on themselves they could simply used a more "to the point" plugins but they don't so what is it that a web design person like you suggests.

4. spam

yes wordpress is not designed to handle big sites out of the box an spam/comment handling is just one issue, but probably no free CMS is designed for that.
I never heard anyone saying that wordpress answers all possible specification. Big sites are a very small niche so actually there is no surprise they don't get much love.

5. updates

You developed the site for millions and you could not find the budget to write your own small SEO plugin? You should blame yourself in your update situation (and therefor the clutter as well)

I agree that plugins like yaost and jetpack should never be used in anything which is more then a simple blog, but if a pro like you install that shit for his clients then how will it ever change? Did you try to contact yaost to get him doing LTS releases? How will anything improve if pros continuing to encourage the junk plugin and ignore the good ones?

BTW, every time I login to my server ubuntu notifies me there are updates to install, so should we just abandon ubuntu?

6. Security "The fact that every line of code is loaded every time any page is hit"

That is simply not true, and worse it is irrelevant as opcode caching was incorporated into latest PHP versions which means that the number of files "loaded" is irrelevant as in practice all the code reside in the memory of the server.

"clients donn't trust wordpress security"

So again clients are idiots. There is a much bigger chance of security problems when one developer works alone than in a project which is used and its code is inspected by thousands of developers, some of them security experts.
Most security issue wordpress had for a long time were a result of insecure hosting, theme or plugins.

If you want a secure code which is up to government standards the problem is not wordpress core but your code and the fact that you didn't properly audit the plugins you decided to use.