It's 1999 all over again.

Anyone who has been in this business a couple decades remembers Dave Shea's CSS Zen Garden. Who knew one well-documented layout could morph from a Chinese-styled zen garden to a maritime theme with sea monsters?!

MySpace was a frontier of customizable home pages each user could easily hack to our heart's content to deliver unique styles.

Even though Kubrick gave us a few customizations (that header gradient really could be different colors) WP themes have been heavily-opinionated styles set in stone for a decade or more. The customizer has been a strict set of parameters to limit the damage contributors could do to our design.

While Tailwind and Bootstrap are inlining more and more code and standardizing components for developers, these and other libraries are also inspiring low- or no-code solutions for next-generation creators.

I have joined the bandwagon to embrace Gutenberg after reluctance through the '10s. Inspiring contributors to improvise on a base theme is right in line with the jazz-influenced ethos of this project!

Jazz relies on an understanding of the inherent rules of music to fully experience the collaborative creation that flourishes in a session. Likewise, borrowing and embellishing components from the framework and other contributors inspires familiar yet unique expressions of the genre that reflect the context of the design.

After all, aren't we tired of complaining about one-size-fits-all or monopolistic solutions that do more harm than good for end users?

Good on ya Automattic!