In reply to Peter Knight.

Peter, I think you miss one point however in all of this: Much of what is bloat today are things that really should be plugins and not pure "core" items. That isn't to say that they shouldn't created and maintained by the core group, but rather that the way they are presented and distributed should be similar to other plugins.

Instead, we have a product with things like Emoji support as a "core" item rather than a plug in. It's a cute feature, whatever, but is it really "CORE"?

When you read through much of the complaint / gripe / features threads around here and other places, you will see that much is to do with core features that many consider shouldn't be part of the core. The decisions made to make more and more things into core products is contributing massively to bloat, complexity, and yes, security issues. Expanding the mandatory code base always adds security issues. I don't just emojis, but any security issue with them would become a problem for me. I would much rather they were a plug in I could activate or delete if I didn't feel I need it.

I think wordpress could progress much further if the core group worked on maintaining both a strong core and a strong group of high level plug ins to provide all the fancy features. Core should be the base, the foundation, and not the fancy painted trim on the windows.