In reply to Nick.

It doesn't matter what they are and no matter how much you jump up and down it won't change.

Business owners/marketers/whatever want ease of setup and use. Period.

There are Shopify sites that do 10s of millions of $ (if not more). Setting up a Shopify site compared to Woo is like night and day (and yes, I've done both, as well as a bunch of others - I remember The Exchange Project and some other dinosaurs).

Nobody that's trying to run a business that actually sells anything is interested in all of the issues that come with WP/Woo unless they already know how to use it (like me for example).

Automatic (or somebody else) is going to have to fork WP and create a closed system (way more closed than .com since they're actually making that more and more open) if they want to compete with the likes of Shopify. That is the ONLY way.