In reply to Alec.

@alec I don’t want to challenge you because I agree with a lot of what you have said. However I think your comments about caching and JetPack are a little contradictory.

I could be wrong but I believe keeping page caching out of core has been a very conscious decision on the part of the core development team. You’re right that good page caching is difficult to set up. However it’s one of those problems that is very platform specific and there are so many different ways to do it and so many variables ( i.e. Varnish vs Nginx vs ElastiCache vs Redis etc ). Implementing a one size fits all solution in core may be more limiting and feel like you’re having a decision shoved down your throat – much like your gripes with JetPack.

I like the current implementation – where core provides a serviceable caching API and what you do with it and where you store it is up to you. There are a multitude of free plugins ( one of which Automattic has it’s hands in to improve ease of use https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/ ) and for clients who need a bit more I’ve found managed hosting to be well worth the cost. I use Pantheon which does Varnish page caching, Redis object caching, PHP7 and global edge CDN and it all just works without me hardly needing to lift a finger.