While I might read a lot of Wordpress articles, I've rarely commented.

I decided to comment here because I'm finally seeing more than a couple of people in one place articulate the frustrations regarding Jetpack. I can tell by reading most of the remarks I'm not alone in having frustration build over a long period of time.

The discontinuation of the old Stats plugin is the *only* reason I started using Jetpack in the first place. I didn't want to lose several years of stats history with understood parameters, so yes, it was a "decision" to continue. However, I wasn't a happy camper regarding the change from a single purpose tool to what I viewed *at that point* as _________________ [fill in the blank with points made above]. And that was when there were...what...at most...six modules?

With the exception of a couple of older sites with that Stat history I do want to keep, I'm working towards phasing Jetpack out completely.

Unfortunately, a good amount of "available" time for research on the subject has been spent on first triaging sites with load time issues and very often finding Jetpack is somehow involved, directly or indirectly (slow load or conflict), and/or dealing with new issues with almost every update (automatically activated modules, trying to figure what some of the stuff even is).

all the while, knowing, I need to decide whether I can customize things, permanently, where I would like to retain Stats.

As far as privacy (and security) concerns go, I don't think you can fix what is baked in the cake, but my biggest concerns about Gravatar. (https://wptavern.com/how-to-use-ghostery-to-find-trackers-added-by-wordpress-plugins, http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/44717/is-gravatar-a-privacy-risk http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21117/is-using-gravatar-a-security-risk, http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/07/got-an-account-on-a-site-like-github-hackers-may-know-your-e-mail-address/, http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2014/03/how-to-stop-leaking-your-internal-sites.html)

I do believe most of the individual folks who work on Jetpack are incredibly responsive and helpful, etc. To underline this, I'll point out something that might be helpful to people who still want / need to use Jetpack but want to strip out modules altogether. Jeremy Herve provided detailed instructions and code last November. I've tested it and it does work wonderfully:

http://jeremyherve.com/2013/11/19/customize-the-list-of-modules-available-in-jetpack/

You can have some fabulous, incredibly smart people working on a project, but, if there's a set plan or a philosophy that's the problem, you can't change what's baked in the cake. This quot from Knut summarizes the root of the problem(s):

"Has Jetpack now become the advanced site developers toolkit, not “goodies” for the end user or common blogger?

Jepack is an options, not decisions hell."

The best thing would be to make all plugins separate and have Jetpack be a warehouse of all Automattic plugins IF users DECIDE that's what they want.