In reply to ts.

I am compelled to reply here – this is spot on. I make my living as a WordPress developer and have done so in a professional capacity for almost 4 years now. Before that, I built the theme for a university’s blog for 4 years, which got millions of hits a year. I’ve been using WP since the early days, somewhere around 2006 or so. I’ve watched it morph into what it is today.

The fact that it is been thrust, warts, bugs, issues, and everything continuously forward without ever listening to its’ developer community is just astounding to me. Developers don’t want what is being done to WP right now – this was clear during the early development. The 2300 one-star reviews on the WP Plugin Directory (and constantly counting) continue to resoundingly reconfirm this.

So, you ask – why aren’t more people adoptinng it? Simple. You’re (the core team developing FSE/Gutenberg) are not asking if we want it. If you did, you’d find out pretty quick that most developers – not “regular users” – don’t want it. While I’ve come around to seeing that Blocks themselves have their place, the rest of Gutenberg – and by extension, FSE at the moment – is a nasty, ill-conceived mess that should never have made it to launch. It’s still not ready, and as long as inconsistencies across the breadth of the project along with the worst implementation of structured data I’ve ever seen (inline everything… and comments… really???!?) means it never really will be.

Gutenberg and the direction of WP for front-end development needs to be seriously rethought. If that doesn’t happen, guess what? Developers will leave to better structured, better coded and better performing solutions. The writing is on the wall.