Justin, I like the series idea and I’ve always enjoyed your take on things. Bowe (long time eh?) has a valid point too. This whole thing has become big business just like we knew it would back in the day. Personally, I’m a big proponent of simplicity and I’ve been pitching removing third party page builders in lieu of the core Gutenberg editor. I would like to believe that open source will prevail. I’ve been pulling for web standards over proprietary silos. Although there has been evidence to the contrary in the last ten years, I believe that, as the rate of adoption reaches a critical mass, consumers will become more educated and in some cases miseducated. This is why everyone thinks they should build their own website now. There will always be a landscape of commercial WordPress and other website builder products simply because time is money and convenience sells. There will always be the few of us who want to control the whole stack end to end, but I foresee a server-less, code-less, database-less, drag-and-drop build an app/site future for the majority. Gutenberg will fill part of that gap for the time being. Page builders got out in front of Wordpress, but Gutenberg will catch up quickly because it’s open source. The Disrupting Wordpress article cited in a comment above also emphasizes this. Gutenberg is more extensible and will have the advantages of being consolidated into the core where it’ll more closely align with the API and guarantee installs. Plus… it’s free.

I’ve now found myself adding Gutenberg to other frameworks which attest to its extensibility. Although a bit off topic… If we could push core into considering an effort to apply the same sorta ease of use in the presentation layer ( Gutenberg / Customizer ) to modifying the data structure, we’d be on to something. I don’t use third party libraries for custom fields or post types and I don’t want to cram the posts table with data that doesn’t really belong. I’m often torn between providing the familiarity and ease of use for end users and the power and structure of a more robust framework. This debate will happen again in a couple years when drag-and-drop data queries, fields, and relations become the norm.