In reply to James Huff.

James, thank you for your well considered reply. I am sure that from your perspective, you are correct in your assessment - at least in part. There are several points that I willingly concede. Yes, there are a great number of free themes and plugins. Yes, new releases are made available for developers to scrutinize. Yes, the dot com and dot org are separate entities. And in truth, my comments may be a bit unfair on one level or another. I appreciate all the work that has gone into WordPress and I certainly do not begrudge anyone for trying to make a buck.

You said, in regards to the compatibility issue, "...the onus of such a thing cannot be placed on the core WordPress developers alone." Who then? Surely the 'after-market' developers have absolutely no control over this issue. They are not the tail wagging the dog. The core WordPress developers act and the theme and plugin crowd responds. Such is the nature of the relationship (excepting those core file developers that have their own theme and plugin efforts).

I should mention that I am unaware of the efforts to make WordPress backward compatible. That is to be expected. I am a user, not a developer. I only know what my experiences and those of my associates convey to me. My barometer are the many themes and plugins that are broken with every automatic update. Another telltale sign are the numerous broken and unsupported plugins that remain available for download long after their associated websites have gone the way of the dodo bird and the developer no longer responds to emails or any other efforts at contact..

Finally, you said, "There are so many plugins available these days that there is bound to be at least one up-to-date alternative." An associate and I are volunteers. We are trying to put together a project for a charitable organization (read: no available budget). We are currently testing about ten different sites simultaneously. Having spent day after day - for months on end - doing nothing but evaluating plugins and themes that play nice with each other, I gotta tell you; from a user's perspective, your optimism sounds like wishful thinking at it's best or simply unsupported hyperbole on the other end of the spectrum. I CRINGE at every WP update. It usually means everything breaks and starting from scratch.

I stand amazed at all the things that WP can do. It is a wonderful content management platform. But as it stands, WP is the worlds best blogging software. If a user's vision exceeds those parameters, he better have a team of PHP programmers on retainer. I think that the core developers have a programmer's perspective. Self hosting isn't just for the deep pocketed or technically capable anymore.

Thanks for lending an ear to the little guy.