@Kevinjohn Gallagher -
Every company, if not individual, should use the best tools are their disposal for the job they have to do.
I completely agree. Use whatever will make your work easier and your life happier. Turning software preference into a cause for battle is just dumb. I have friends at Acquia, even. :)

Jane is awesome, but last year Jane was Head of UX, Head of Project Management, Head of Release Management, Head of Community Management, Head of WP.org, Head of WordCamps, Head of the WP Foundation, Head of User Engagement, Head of Charity, Head of Money in WPF, Head of WCCentral, Head of… etc.
I wasn't all those things. I do a bunch of stuff that touches a lot of areas, but when someone asks what I do, I say I am the ux lead and I project manage the open source dev group. Matt is in charge of wp.org and the Foundation, Andrea is in charge of WordCamps (now being covered by Zé since A is on maternity leave), most of those other things don't really exist as roles.

Anytime there’s a job that isn’t covered by the WP team, it’s suddenly “Jane does that”.
More like, "Jane will try to find someone to do that," which sometimes takes a while.

Oh, and if this image ( http://t.co/mVdB3i7I ) is an Agile Development project plan,
Are you crazy? Of course it's not! It's something we came up with at core team meetup that is extremely specific to the wp core team members pairing up for 3.4, their schedules, our past weaknesses, ux bottlenecks, etc. The idea of a set cycle time is about the only thing that's similar to agile.

then Jane’s not a Project Manager. Because I’m considering digging a grave in my back garden just to turn in it.
Sadly, yes, I am. It's just not the most visible part of my job, and the level of PM that happens within WP is nowhere near the level that exists in an agency environment (which I worked in for years). When I started, no one wanted any kind of project management. Even making a rough schedule for a release took a few tries to be accepted by the guys.

And Andrea, we’ve had Core Team members, and people paid for by Matt on this very website tell us that the beta WAS NOT tested on IE7 because the plan was to drop support for IE7, but then they changed their minds; but never went back to test it. So I’m only repeating what we’re told by Otto.
For the record, Otto is not a member of the core team. Trusted contributor, yes, but not core team. There was no plan in 3.3 to drop support for IE7, so that's incorrect. Mark said he wanted to, but we said no before the cycle was even scoped. The issue had more to do with some miscommunication around who was testing on what platforms and/or virtual machines, which is something we'll hopefully be fixing in 3.4 with the introduction of a formal QA plan (post coming to wpdevel once I have time to write it).

I’ve also raised this with Nacin and MarkJaquith on Twitter, who both joked that we should just use a different browser.
Sometimes we joke instead of repeating conversations that have been had in irc multiple times. Also, yes: IE7 sucks. :)

Additionally, Jane blogged about the UAT that she did before the BETA was considered ready. Everyone used a Mac, Everyone used FireFox/Chrome. Every person.
It wasn't formal UAT. I used to run a usability testing lab in NYC; I'm clear on what constitutes representative testing. This was just lo-fi UI reactions to confirm or reject some of the gut-instinct choices that had been made. I wrote about the difference on my blog at the time, and the whole platform/tools conundrum. The limited scope was highly intentional because it was very limited-scope testing.

If anything, it’s a great example of how WordPress doesn’t really scale. Can you make it scale technically? Sure. But People and Process wise? It gets very difficult once you get past 10 people.
Then someone needs better hires.

But again, when Core Team members stand infront of a WordPress gathering and say “Don’t listen to the Vocal Minority, even if they’re right” it’s hard for us to help. The attitude is, You’re with us or against us. Other viewpoints are not welcome.
You talked about that before, but the fact is that there are some heavy contributors that we don't agree with on a lot of major things who still manage to make it onto the credits page b/c they continue to contribute and improve the product even though they won't always get their way.

Be careful, or Pete Mall will kick start a project to replace your forum, and then run off when there’s work to be done.
That's not nice.

WP3.3 Menu is inaccessible It can’t be used by Color Blind people, the same with the grey on grey buttons of the HTML editor.
As it happens, the style lead for WP, Matt Thomas, is color blind. That said, there is more than one type of color blindness, not to mention other visual acuity issues that have different contrast requirements. We count on the accessibility volunteers to test the admin for that kind of stuff. Recently I asked Mel (Esmi on the forums) to act as the go-to person for accessibility and take the disparate pieces of advice we get from the accessibility blog into discrete recommendations the devs can act on, and she said yes. So this, too, will hopefully improve.

Navigating WP Admin without a mouse is a nightmare, but when I say that people think “iPad”.
I don't, I think keyboard access. As someone who loses the use of her hands/wrists every few days and has to rely on keyboard access about half the time because using a mouse or trackpad is too painful, I couldn't care less about iPads (which, being basically the same as trackpads, are mostly unusable for me).

how confident are you that it was tested on a screen reader?
People who tested on screen readers posted their findings to the accessibility blog. If you know of something problematic for readers, making a trac ticket for it will at least get it on the radar.

For one one of our clients, and government based charity, we have to provide a report of any UI changes against the RNIB Disability Discrimination Act, and the WRIA’s AA and AAA standard. WordPress 3.3′s admin area was considered to be HARMFUL. Not “OK”, not “poor”, not “bad”, but HARMFUL.
If there's a list of the specific things that caused that rating and what we can do to fix them, we would love to get a copy of it.

But thats ok, we tested it on Chrome on a MacBook Pro, with able bodied people all of whom speak English on a small website. Because thats indicative of the world, right?
No, but again, that testing was not meant to be indicative of the world. It had a specific, small purpose.

436 days to get the bbPress plugin from first commit to release, with a paid Automattic developer.
A paid Automattic developer who's the lead for BuddyPress, a much bigger project with a bigger user base and more immediate needs, and who had a new job at Automattic that had nothing to do with building bbPress or BuddyPress. No harshing on Jtrip, please, he had way more work on his plate last year than anyone probably realized.

Remember we had a roadmap for 3.0 > 3.4 at the time of 3.0beta1.
Who's we? We've never done a roadmap that far in advance that I can remember. Link? We might all talk about what things we hope we'll get to next time around, or what we each think should come next, but there's no roadmap until we scope each release, and we don't plan further ahead than the current cycle in terms of features.

I’ve no idea why people are upset that WE have chosen to no longer use WordPress. You folks can still use it.
I'm not upset. I'd much rather see people happily using something else than be frustrated using a product that doesn't serve their needs.

No1 wants u 2 have ur own opinion.
“In Matt we trust.”
That's lame and ridiculous. It certainly didn't come from anyone on core team, and I'm sorry that happened to you.

I wonder if they have WordPress tattoos… ;)
I have tattoos, but have never understood why someone would put a product logo on their body permanently. I'll stick to putting stickers on my laptop.

Good luck with your new CMS!