For what Automattic want WordPress to be, WP 5 seems to be a sensible move. WP is a viable choice for the Squarespace and Wix crowd that want to build a website without knowing anything about how to design or code. These services are eating their (lucrative) lunch, and a move toward ease of building makes real sense.<p>Sadly, this isn't the reason WP is popular. People use it because it's the most popular CMS, because of the marketed belief that it's the easiest to use, and because there is a perceived belief that it's quick to develop features because "we'll just use a plugin for that". While there are many teams out there that do WP "right", I'd say they are in a small minority. Most WP sites I've used have been a total mess.<p>I've used a lot of content management systems and frameworks in the past, and while it's on a framework many refuse to use, I'd say the best open-source CMS available for user experience and extensibility is Umbraco. While the core community can be a bit reclusive to outsiders, and HQ eager to push profitable products, Umbraco is easy to use, easy to install, and has a rich ecosystem of plugins to allow developers to build stuff easily. I liken it a bit to the early Rails community in how it acts.<p>As far as WP is concerned, I feel that WP is too big to simply be a site builder to some, and a framework to others, making Gutenberg a knee-jerk reaction that doesn't really solve either problem. The best thing they could do is accept that WP developers are analogous to React developers or Rails developers in that they define themselves by their framework of choice, and to do that WordPress needs to expand into its own PHP framework. Gutenberg can be a part of that, but it would be a part of the framework, not the driving force behind page creation.<p>Disclaimer: A few years ago, I was making a tidy side income from porting WP sites to Umbraco, and if I weren't too busy I'd continue to do it because there is no shortage of pissed off clients with crappy WP sites that want a usable CMS.