The fact that a talented man such as John James Jacoby (JJJ) had to turn to a crowdfunding site (IndieGoGo) to raise $50,000 in order to devote himself full-time to the development of BuddyPress, bbPress, etc. for 6 months speaks volumes as to just how "far" WordPress has come in my own humble opinion. I began using WordPress almost from the word go, and registered domains such as WordBlog.com, NoteBlog.com, CommunityBlog.com, CommentBlog.com, SpyBlog.com, CustomerBlog.com and so forth way back in 2003/2004 (one of the first domain names I'd hand-registered was Inkblot.com back in 1998), because I saw the potential, but 10 years + on I can see a lot of the pitfalls as well. So many great developers put their time and efforts into the betterment of WordPress and it's theme and plugin ecosystem, yet they see very little in return for their efforts, especially on a monetary level, and that, in the end, could very well be the actual undoing of WordPress if anything were to ever threaten it's world-web dominance. Hundreds of millions in investment funding gets completely wasted each and every year on "the next big thing", that which never usually pans out of course, yet nobody seems truly interested in dumping any really money into WordPress, a proven winner, on anything near those scales of capital expenditure. Imagine if someone "invested" a mere $1,200,000 into providing a decent salary ($100,000 each) for one year to the 10 best and brightest developers in the WordPress community, such as JJJ, to devote themselves fully and completely, to a set list of projects to be completed by the end of that time-frame, what that could do for the platform as a whole when all was said and done. That's the true way, in the end, to keep WordPress at the summit of the mountain.