Immensely disappointing, and at least at the surface, it feels like another case of devs putting design features last. And shouldn't the discussion about whether this is of value to WordPress have happened long before now? A bunch of people worked hard on this, but apparently it only takes one lead developer who for some reason doesn't understand why it's valuable to almost cancel the whole thing. If people didn't specify clearly enough why this is needed, it's because it feels obvious to everyone.

If I'm missing something about this situation or why rolling out this API could be a bad idea, I'm happy to hear more.

Thanks for the thoughtful coverage.