Moves like this aren't personal, though it's easy to take them that way. When months of work result in continued frustration, it's clear something else needs to change for the better.

Erlend isn't wrong that in the time since I joined Automattic, projects with full time attention like Discourse have made huge strides towards better representing what a modern piece of community software looks like.

I think it's important to remember that just like WordPress, BuddyPress is more toolkit than turnkey. No matter how quickly the installation goes, no matter how low the barrier to entry is, the step up to mastery is enormous, even for professionals.

Posts like Erlend's make me wish I could have stepped in earlier to see if there was opportunity to work towards a different outcome. But once a ship sails, all you can do is continue improving what you can and be ready if that ship returns some day.

Hopefully the next time Erlend pops his head up from Discourse and looks around, the bb's will be their next obvious choice, again.