Am I the only person here who thinks this blog post and this comment thread is an awful lot of discussion about nothing? That perhaps there is simply not enough information to have written a blog post that gave this guy a free advertisement injected into the dashboards of tens of millions of WordPress blogs around the world?

Isn't debating the expense premature without knowing the content of the seminar, and thus whether or not it is worth it to you. Either it is or it isn't. But we can't even have a useful conversation about why an $800 seminar on WordPress is valuable to fellow professionals because all we know so far is it will be light and airy and chock full o' wordpressy goodness. We have no information on yet to base that decision, except that the organizer has set a price for a product that doesn't exist yet, but won't be all that different from your $50 light and airy and chock full o' wordpressy goodness get-togethers. When we do know some details, this discussion makes sense. How much you pay for your business seminars doesn't impress me. What the organizer has said so far is underwhelming to say the least - not all that much different a speaker lineup than an average WordCamp? I've met lots of legendary WordPress gurus and experts who make their living with WordPress and you know what? Something tells me the key to their success had a lot to do with offering their customers incredible value for their dollar, and working hard - without being constantly mindful of how their fellow wordpress up-and-comer was ruining their wordcampy good time.

The funny thing is, I'm not so sure that you all didn't work out the solution in real time to keeping the techno-riff-raff away from your development sessions. Just charge double the fee for those sessions; you'll be assured of your premium status and can be [reasonably] assured old ladies won't come strolling in asking how to activate plugins during Dev sessions.

When you factor in travel and accommodations, the cost of attending a $600 seminar is not 10+ times the cost of attending a $50 seminar. It sounds like that was a quick initial response to the premise. Anyone could make argument for $600-800 for some semi-deluxe technological amenities.

I appreciate that everyone's trying to bend over backwards to be nice to the next person on this thread, but there's this negative energy that comes across from the group as a whole that people who depend on WordPress to do their life's work are ruining your good time at every WordCamp you go to. If you make your living with WordPress, your educational eggs aren't all in the WordCamp basket, are they?

The irony is that for the people who are seemingly eager to pay the high price tag, what kind of speaker/presentation are you going to get access to for a 2 day seminar for $600-800? Nobody seems to have any idea just how utterly arbitrary the cost is, particularly since there is no content organized for people to to make an informed decision about. Is anyone worth their weight in salt who is recognized as a leader in the WordPress community going to jump at a few hundred dollars speaking fee to speak at this conference? Are you going to get a PhD from the future to come in and get you up to speed in PHP 6 in 3 easy hours? I would be extremely skeptical that the people who jump at this gig are the least qualified to be doing so - you know the WordPress types who are all sales and good with internet lingo with no underlying substance or reason. I wouldn't jump to that conclusion if common sense didn't compel me to ask the obvious.

Which brings me back to my original point about the post and discussion being entirely premature. The groupthink going on in this blog post + discussion threads has an air of selfishness that doesn't seem to jive with the WordPress community I hold in such high esteem. The guy may offer a perfectly great value, and he may price out 99% of the WordPress community but that doesn't preclude it from being a super successful coming together of some awesome people spending some time away from the office rediscovering why they love WordPress.