In reply to djsteveb.

Thanks for sharing your experience, DJ Steve. Mine is remarkably similar. We build sophisticated websites with important additional functionality. Those issues with updates breaking sites and gratuitous security vulnerabilities (XML-RPC, Jetpack: gratuitous as for most sites including the functionality is mainly or entirely unused) have made our job miserable.

Like you, I like to provide value to our clients, not ding them again and again for security and update issues. I'm in this to build a better world. At one point, contributing to WordPress seemed a good path to that end. Less and less.

Seeing clients occasionally forced to shut down their websites due to maintenance issues makes me very sad: this happened again last week. It's like renovating your house every year: some people do it, but it's enormously wasteful. Especially in a down year. Imagine being forced to do so.

We do participate in make.wordpress.org/core/ though we don't have time for Slack. When we've discovered and documented performance or structural issues we've often not found a very sympathetic ear. Of the core team, Mark Jaquith seems by far both the most astute.

In any case, right now dealing with core developers basically asking the drag racers to build you a family car. As is evident from both Jan and Mark K's writing, they enjoy promoting their hardliner stance more than helping developers build secure and stable websites. There isn't much use talking when no one is listening.

WordPress has gone so far off the rails that it now makes sense to pay $50/month/site for hosting a low traffic site just to avoid being hacked and to have reasonably competent support somewhat available (WP Engine). The Rainmaker Platform offer at $900 or $1500/year even makes sense: WordPress which works (and with a clean and useful dashboard). This is what our lovely free blog and CMS tool to which we have all been contributing, many of us for nearly a decade, has come to. A long way from "democratizing publishing".

I started this post to answer you about static WordPress. We've been through this debate before. Moveable Type 2.6 was static, while WordPress was dynamic. Static indeed was very high performance. The tradeoffs in terms of functionality are enormous though. A developer can do so much more with a dynamic website. Modern websites have a lot of moving pieces. Forcing them back through a static funnel will create a lot of pain. I remain convinced that a stripped down WordPress is the best way forward. It avoids throwing out hundreds of thousands of man hours of great coding (there were many who contributed over the years who do not share the drag racer attitude of the current core). Done properly we can even retain compatibility with most themes (not with the builder parts of them which are bundled trouble for the most part). A theme cleaner could probably be written. Most well written plugins should run as written or require minimal modification.

I'd rather some kind of compromise could be reached with both a stable and an experimental branch of WordPress under the same roof. Forking implies a certain duplication of effort and waste as those of us who lived through Mambo to Joomla remember. Still, if attaining stability and security requires forking, then it's a price worth paying. Copyblogger have basically created their private fork already.

While there was more heat than light in JD's post, one good notion would be to use the API to turn off all these features. I will look into using the API in my initial BusinessPress (codename for now) plugin to allow the user to turn off as many features as the API will allow. This will at least fast track the development and reduce the amount of code needed.