In reply to Terence.

This is just about the opposite of what is happening...

(not talking about a soft fork - I actually agree with you there)

From a dev point of view, WordPress is about to get more difficult, unless you have invested some proper time in learning modern web development practices.

From a user perspective, this whole Gutenberg thing is designed for those that WordPress might lose to Wix of Squarespace. I see their aim, as providing a framework that theme builders can build atop to create themes that work in a much easier way, without the need for so many plugins etc.

Having another admin screen for managing widgets was hardly intuitive. To take that example further, having a plugin to determine whether that widget should show on a page/post, as opposed to actually determining if the widget is used on the page or post edit screen is, was, and always will be backwards.

From what I can gather from ACF and others, Gutenberg will work out of the box with their plugins, so not sure how it is going to stop people building custom CMS builds.

Not that I like the way they have gone about this whole thing. They are patting themselves on the back now for listening, suggesting they did a great job. They didn't... they did a terrible terrible job, and only started listening when the community roared.