In reply to Tevya.

I love data! We have a ton of it. Some advocates want us to add more extensive click/feature tracking to core which will significantly shift the privacy profile of core WordPress in a way I'm profoundly uncomfortable with, and that will require significant development (I would estimate more than 6-9 months) to instrument, store, process, and display in any useful way. That estimate is based on having developed and iterated systems to do exactly that for Automattic products several times in the past. Also without knowing a fair amount about the sites and people submitting the data, it will be challenging to profile or understand what types of users are submitting which data -- do they manage one site or many? What's their primary language? What's their technical level, and what's their goal with WP? Is there something they want to accomplish that we can't track with clicks? Are they multi-device? Are there barriers to how they interact with their device?

We get a ton of data from user tests of our own and competitive products (something data collection in WP would never provide), working with people of various experience levels with WP, helping developers use the new APIs and getting their feedback, the dozens of meetup and WordCamp presentations thus far, and of course if we're blocked and something more widespread and anonymous is needed there are web hosts that can share data without us needing to add more call-home, privacy-damaging features in core.

That's helpful today, vs anonymous aggregated data collection in core WP we couldn't get any useful info from before next year. User-based methods of data collection and testing show there is a ton of work that needs to be done, and reveal issues that would never be shown by knowing how many times a block in Gutenberg is used. We have many months of work ahead based on what we know today. We'll also keep an eye on usage data that hosts collect to see if there's anything we're missing. People seem to be arguing with the straw man that we're developing core blind, or that I don't know how to use data, or that I don't care about data, none of which is remotely true. What I see a lot more is that they disagree with a decision and want a number they can point at and argue about.

There are other types of usage information, particularly for the plugin and theme directory, that take much less time to develop and provide actionable, useful information to developers they couldn't get otherwise. Those features we'll invest time and server resources in.