Could Gutenberg be great? Eventually yes but what’s making it weak is what is left out, some things that would make it more practical and palatable to a lot more users.

The biggy is how bad the code view is and has always been in WordPress. In fact I am warming to how you can target the code in each block.

What’s letting it down is that the code is horribly formatted. I am surprised that Wordpress has never cracked this seeing as it is the fundamental nuts and bolts of web design and, we see how it can be done in the Froala editor and CodePen. Additionally we recently have seen the introduction of code mirror in WordPress and it’s surprising that it hasn’t been further developed and pushed into more places in WP.

A better IDE like experience for code would also clean up having to view all the comment tags delineating blocks and make the code more useable.

Other small quibbles. Better implementation of metaboxes and how they can be arranged including WP standard controls like being able to move featured Ines to the top under the Title as you can do now for CPTs.

Being realistic, my extras are not going to miraculous appear anytime soon due to the amount the time it takes to implement such things. This all begs the question why Gutenberg is being forced as the de facto default at this early stage. The implementation with classic plugin to retain the current editor is clumsy and bug prone. A simpler switch in Writing settings that triggers the filter:

add_filter('gutenberg_can_edit_post_type', '__return_false');

would be more sensible because Gutenberg and classic just don’t play well together.

If and when Gutenberg hits the spot for all workflows and use cases with all pain point ironed out, then phase out the classic editor. It all just seems premature at this stage.