Out of all of the Studio 24 statements, I would say that this one is the most indicative of where they and a lot of other agencies stand on WP right now:

“More generally, we think this push to expand Gutenberg is an indication of WordPress focusing on the requirements of their non-technical user base as opposed to their audience of web developers building custom solutions for their clients.”

For context – I work at a design focused agency that places a lot of value on providing a great admin experience for content authors that provides both a flexible authorship experience that is also limited. We want to prevent content authors (who – no shade – are not designers and typically do not have “design awareness”) from messing up a great design that they paid quite a bit of money for. From this perspective, Gutenberg feels very iffy:

Yes – I can create custom blocks. Yes – I can remove default blocks or restyle them based on a projects needs (though, with a slew of ‘breaking changes’, this feels like less of a solid option). But in doing all of this – you spend more time removing things, and you are more vulnerable to future additions/markup changes/who knows what else. And to top it off, training content authors to create rich, resource related content with Gutenberg blocks takes longer and is more vulnerable to improper content entry, compared to using ACF fields and TinyMCE.

As such, it feels more and more like WP is becoming less and less of a product is BOTH a consumer friendly product and a CMS that can be customized to the needs and desired limitations of a project by a developer. This is something that is really is starting to shake my confidence in the CMS, something this WP fanboi didn’t really think was possible.

Wanted to say this just to echo Studio 24’s reluctance and insecurity with the future of the project. It’s something that I think WP should really take into perspective and ideally address. Even if their plan is “yeah, from here on out, we are now primarily aiming at non-technical users and not custom CMS developers”, it would be great to know so I can peacefully move on to another CMS, rather than riding on a wave of uncertainty.