In reply to Jeff Chandler.

@Cavalary - Those surveys will only reflect those who are highly motivated to fill them out. It won't be an accurate picture.

Not to mention it won't cover every aspect of WordPress that could be tracked. Otherwise it would end up being a huge lost of "Do you use X?" questions and such. As motivated as I am to help WP improve, a survey like that would tax my patience.

J A Konrath touched on a similar idea in publishing if Amazon would give authors access to reading data for Kindle Unlimited. Since Amazon tracks readers to pay authors on a per-page basis, imagine if an author was able to see that most everyone stopped reading around page 105. That would tell them "Hey! Something's wrong at about this point!" and they can make edits.

Same principal applies here. Telemetry allows them to see what features are being used and which ones are not which allows them to realign priorities and even move things out of core.