A view of Gutenberg from a 'traditional' WordPress Plugin and Theme development agency.

Over the past 8 years, our team has built over 100 WordPress plugins (19 of which are open source on wordpress.org) and spent 5 years developing a WP Customizer framework.

Sorry, that is not an ad - just to let you know that we are WP devs who are very experienced CSS / SaaS, PHP programmers.

6 months ago we decided that we need to get all of our plugins and Theme framework ready for Gutenberg. Imagine our anxiety when we could barely read Gutenberg React JS let alone write it.

In order to be able to work with Gutenberg as a team over the last 4 months we have set about learning the following - Firstly JavaScript - ES5 / ES6

Then React - which we found is much more than just a JS lib - it requires learning

* JSX
* React Router
* Redux
* Testing (Jest, Enzyme, Cyprus )
* Web Pack
* Bable

React is also evolving with a very active development community - for example, the essential create-react-app latest version just added support for Typescript (another learning curve).

To date learning all of this involved 450+ hours of study per developer ( and we have not even touched learning Next.js, Gatsby.js, Preact.js, Node.js )

Now we get to the Gutenberg Docs and find that they are not what we would hope - example Depreciated Blocks are removed in Gutenberg v 4.2.0, whilst Formatting API for extending RichText is new - but there are no Docs for it.

From a WordPress developers point of view, the barrier to entry to the world of Gutenberg is masive.

My point here is that it is the same for all of us - What stood out for me was a month ago when the Accessibility team leader Rian Rietveld stepped down from the project.

On that blog post the number one and number 2 problems cited where:

The codebase of Gutenberg is difficult for all of us, because no one in the wpa11y team is a skilled React developer. So it was hard to implement changes and write PRs ourselves. What we could do is test, tell what’s wrong and what it should be and hope a developer would pick it up. A lot of a11y work has been done by the Gutenberg team but major issues still exist.
There was no React developer with accessibility experience in the community, and no React accessibility experts from outside the community willing to work on the issues for free.

My point is that there are not a lot of React engineers.

@EyesX makes an interesting and possibly valid point here

WordPress is no longer an open source project, it’s an Automattic project. If anyone thinks otherwise then you are naive.

If you look at the Gutenberg contributors for the last 2 months you will see that there are only 52 people contributing to Gutenberg. Of those as close as I can tell from looking at the profiles.

* 34 Are Automattic employees
* 18 are developers, the majority of who work for larger agencies (eg Yoast)

I realize that there are a lot of people who contribute by posting bug reports, testing etc - but these are the people with the knowledge and experience that are contributing to the code base.

Again my point is - React is a high level and complicated code base and React engineers in the WordPress community from my reading of it are at the moment few and far between.

Its a massive hurdle for any 'traditional' WP developer to climb and from an agency point of view requires a massive dollar investment in training / education.