Jeff, you've mentioned Brian's post about Distraction Free Writing, but he also blogged about his Medium experience. After trying out Medium myself, I find their user experience for content writing to be incredibly friendly and creative in comparison to the DFW writing mode.

It's worth mentioning that there were several strong proposals about making DFW the default editor view. I was opposed to the idea, but seems that even some of the influential Core contributors were interested in making it the default view.

While I agree with Piet that there are other problems with WordPress that we can focus on instead, WordPress is still a Content Management System where content is the main feature. Some of the largest "customers" of the platform are online magazines and newspapers, and they have armies of editors and content writers spending most of the day producing content. Moreover, larger brands and businesses need a strong content marketing strategy in order to build their traffic, maintain their online products and so forth.

The most annoying part with DFW for me is the wide gray area around the content box. It is restrictive and doesn't use all of the space properly. If you tend to scroll just once (which I do by mistake or just reread what I've mentioned above), the view switches back to standard. The view is not consistent and isn't any friendlier in practice.

I also do agree about the Save and Preview buttons - the main reason for "Save" is the unfortunate moments where something happens with JavaScript (say, a conflict with another JS snippet or anything else) and my post isn't saved if I accidentally close my browser. It's old-school, but accidents happen and I save my progress all the time.