While many people will see 3.8 as a mostly cosmetic release, that's not what's so exciting about it. The new "features as plugins" shift in development has the potential to change, not just the WordPress community, but the entire Web software community in general.

We're talking about building features and allowing them to mature over many months rather than just within a dev cycle. Building features that get tested much more than WordPress betas ever will. Allowing developers to have real proposals for concepts that have long been an itch they'd like to scratch.

Anyone who doesn't see how innovative this is doesn't understand this entire change in philosophy and what it could mean for the future of WordPress. WordPress 3.8 renovated how we develop code. This is the time to be excited if you're a developer.

This means we can have quicker and more stable release cycles, get more people involved in the process, and only push new features in when they're absolutely ready.