Maybe this will be a wake up call that was needed. Decisions made by core developers in the name of immediate productivity and in pursuit of perverting goals (50% market share) under arbitrary timelines have tons of unintended consequences.

Inclusiveness, open source ideals, democratising development... These are still ideals of the WP project are they not? There's a big gap between the ideals and the direction WP has been going in.

Gutenberg has raised barriers to entry for anyone looking to contribute or work with WordPress code itself, this seems like a prime example. We're now leaving it up to people who are the narrow minority of people, enlarging the gap between contributors, users, 3rd party developers on one hand and core developers on the other.

Nothing signifies this more to me than the fact that Gutenberg in a departure from standard practice has been shipping with code that can't be easily debugged on the spot (with only built/minified code on offer) without numerous extra steps. It has made a significant part of the codebase the preserve of people who are both comfortable with react and have the inclination and confidence to setup a development environment. Effectively, a signal this sends is that working on that code is for core developers, or those with their abilities. It alters how people behave when they run into problems.

I can't help but note the gap between what well-meaning core team members say and what is the actual case.

When React was chosen, one of the arguments was that was easy enough to learn and that React being so popular would be an advantage in courting attention from the wider JS community. That certainly doesn't seem to have been the case here, with highly motivated contributors struggling to get productive and struggling to find people who do have the required expertise to help.

It was also said that React would only be a layer underneath, with WordPress providing its own more agnostic api layer in between, playing down the need to basically master React to be productive working on core and develop stuff on top of Gutenberg. This just isn't true and it's echoed in this story. If you want to be productive, you need to know React, full stop.

It's been said that Gutenberg has been in "stable release" for a good while now, but every release we see the roll out of new features and major tweaks, while many people routinely encounter bugs that result in lost work and time.

It's one thing to break some eggs in pursuit of a better WordPress experience for the whole, but I find it very hard to think this is the way to go about it. WordPress became a success because the barrier to entry was low and invited people in. We now seem to have switched to a model that seems preoccupied by having a small number of makers produce an end product that is going to wow everyone, particularly the new users who would be choosing between WordPress and hosted solutions like Wix.

In that model, development happens more like in a company and users are more like customers who do not need to know how the sausage is made. The real brilliance happens in the core team, who divine their own solutions and parse what customers say with the understanding that the customer doesn't really know what they are talking about. The response to feedback so far tells the story. You get the same response a company might give. Bad reviews can be treated as noise. It can be labeled as 'interesting data' to the CEO. Or it can be taken as a signal that the coding rockstars just need to work a little harder to get it right. This furthers grows the mental divide between core developers and the wider community, while many community members feel even more divorced from how WordPress evolves.

It's not by design but with the dominant influence of those with high level js skills and react familiarity working in core means all other people are effectively obstacles that slow things down. It's happening between all categories of WordPressers. Even experienced people who've done tons of core work or are noted contributors in other ways have adopted an overly deferential position because they don't feel as competent as others js-centric devs. Contributors with different expertises (like accessibility or privacy) feel like they are at a disadvantage because they are not the first class citizens in core development world.

One of the worst things about this is that the culture just might continue to change to match this dynamic. Users may start treating WordPress more and more like some product produced by a technical team of workers and less like a co-owned community project in which everyone is a potential contributor. The most bewildering thing is how Matt is helping drive this, by pointing at market share ambitions and being preoccupied with competitors that most in the WP community don't even care about. There's no profound vision unfolding here, if it were we'd be building the best editor possible for the sake of users, not for the sake of 'survival' concerns, growth of market share and certainly not under the pressure of artificial time limits while deprioritising other important things, like accessibility and the approachability of WordPress in general.