In reply to fork FTW.

There are massive government organizations (hello US State Department), enormous county governments (Arlington County, VA), and other extremely large sites that took the leap recently and converted HUGE portions of their web/infrastructure over to WordPress. And without accessibility at the forefront of such a massive change to WordPress, it will require many of these groups to fork away from core WordPress or leave WordPress entirely... which will be a HUGE loss to the community due to contributions made. It really comes down to the "bottom line" for Automattic vs "the best solutions" for the community.