In reply to Matt Mullenweg.

Many of the problems with Gutenberg aren't about "stage of development" , they are fundamental decisions about functionality. Trying to build a structured language from HTML comments, rather than using an existing standard like MobileDoc is a critical flaw that will hound Gutenberg with literally endless bugs, but seems to be a core tenet of the dev team. Trying to reconcile React with stateless TinyMCE instances is a critical flaw that muddles state horribly, but once again seems baked in at this point. Even just introducing a new massive JS component seems deeply flawed, given the horrible lack of usable developer documentation for the existing JS components, such as the media library and TinyMCE itself. These are not "work in progress" bugs. They are fundamental flaws with the entire approach.

If 5.0 truly depends on Gutenberg to be released, as you say, than WordPress is missing a critical stage in the dev cycle: The ability to fail gracefully. Massive projects like this MUST have room to be failures, but the core team just keeps pushing this deeply flawed system, as if it is the ultimate solution to everything, rather than just another layered abstraction that pretends unstructured data is structured.