In reply to Sara Rosso.

Hi Sara, nice to see you again! I remember a good day together at WCEI in Vienna where you led the Marketing room on contributors day. Sadly we didn't meet in Paris this year sadly (I was with design and then spent some time introducing my programmers to the right people to work on lingering performance issues). We did send two people to WordPress TV where they helped with social media (we have some real experts in house) and YouTube integration (we're publishers of a platform agnostic video player so we know a lot about YouTube API's). We were thrilled to be able to give back and to learn some new ideas ourselves.

While the marketing team may be made up of volunteers, you are full time staff at Automattic and pretty much shape the marketing plans for WordPress.org. Those plans from what I remember from Vienna are more focused on marketshare and newbie users than on improving the software for agencies and integrators and developers - or our advanced end users, publishers. The WP Tavern crowd is pretty heavily weighted to those three categories and outside of the Automattic sponsored contributors provide the bulk of the contributions to WordPress.

We're pretty frustrated (agencies, integrators, freelance developers) by the WordPress maintenance load and an absence of real improvement to the long term publishing experience on WordPress (those of us on the front lines would like to see more security, built-in caching, fewer but more stable updates). Hopefully we can change that state of affairs for the better with a more open conversation!