This is all eerily reminiscent of MSFT's 2001 decision to dump Visual Basic 6 and force everyone to VB.NET, breaking ALL kinds of legacy code in the process and forcing devs to relearn their craft. Well, at least from a dev's POV. That debate and resistance to that change went on for YEARS...and MSFT basically said, 'oh well, this is the future, get on board or get left behind.'

Sound familiar?

No one remembers VB now. ;-)

Tread carefully, Automattic. Pissing off a majority of your dev base for a pet project is not a wise move. Ignoring them is worse.

If you folks love this thing so much, leave it on wp.com, where it belongs. Leave .org alone. Don't force it on ALL of us because there is some kind of scare over things like WiX and SquareSpace.

Just MHO, having been through this kind of thing once.