I think part of the issue is balancing what developers want to see out of WordPress and what the average WordPress user/blogger wants to see out of the system. While the last few releases have had some nice additions for developers, their major highlights were primarily targeted towards the WordPress user (not developers).

There are many, many more users than there are developers and WP.com users are how WordPress makes money. However, the question becomes - did developers embrace WordPress because users/bloggers were using it, or did users/bloggers embrace WordPress because developers recommended it?