In reply to Terence.

It's a beautiful thing that you agree with someone here.

I like adding context so...

KJG has been harping on WordPress for years, writing posts titled "WordPress has left the building" back in 2012 detailing the many necessary features WordPress was missing for his business and enterprise usecases. His feature list was not totally without merit, mind you. All the things he mentioned were nice to have if you are selling solutions to the kinds of big clients he had at the time. But it was also considered to be wholly unrealistic (trying to have all the benefits without the cons, quickly) and the needs he was trying to meet weren't representative of the average user either.

Unfortunately most of his features are still not in Core as WordPress has grown to 25% of the web today. Gallagher stated he had stopped referring businesses to WP users for the ill state WordPress was in so that growth probably must have come from somewhere else.

If his feature list had become the top of the development agenda, there's a good chance development would have gotten more bloated, more bogged down, all to appease the most sophisticated of business use cases. Implementing major advances can take years, see JSON api, tax meta etc. We'd have people screaming that the platform had gotten far too complex and that developer's were not listening and just seeking to satisfy their own wants.

But here we are in 2015 and he's still around and so I'm guessing most other people here with complaints will stick around. Despite complaints people still keep coming back and WordPress does get better with each release (4.4 is looking amazing) and the contributor pool gets larger and larger, hell commercial WordPress services have gotten so much better too (and they all grow based on the degree to which they listen to user's needs).

But - you know, apparently, it's okay to provide criticism but it is not okay to have that criticism critically evaluated or contested in return. That is why so many here feel fit to use disparaging language, while lamenting how contributors have too much of a thin skin.

Nobody is saying WordPress is perfect, that's not even the point. This is why there are so many contributors trying to make it better. Most of the progress is incremental and every small change invariably has drawn criticism. Unrealistic demands and unrealistic expectations leads to unfair criticism and draw away from the progress that is made.

Is it that hard to ask that when a complaint is responded to, you take effort to consider the whole context rather than put an abritrary amount of people in boxes in order to feel better about yourself?