You know I started to dive back into WordPress very recently after a few years and there are a few things I noticed:<p>- Commercial themes are the selling point of the WordPress ecosystem. The themes are what gets a user to use WordPress in the first place, because it solves a real world problem (examples: you need a portfolio site, you need an urban bar site or you need a real estate site).<p>- That said the quality of WordPress themes can be terrible. They can have conflicting plugins or terrible security holes. So the quality of the developer base is uneven at best (quite a few script kiddies).<p>- WordPress still feels like it's stuck in the year 2008. The usability has only grown more complex, yet the functionality feels stuck in the web 2.0 era.<p>- Automattic is not a unicorn, in fact I feel that it's doomed. Right now the open web feels like it's in deep trouble, and WordPress just isn't mobile first platform. This should have their management in panic mode, but it does not.<p>- For example there should be a way to wrap a WordPress site into an app. Yes there are third party solutions that do this, but Automattic should be doing that. In fact WordPress should have done that in say 2010.<p>- There are also a number of third party plugins that allow you to create a web page sort of like InDesign, but they're all terrible hacks. Again this is something that Automattic should do, but doesn't.<p>- Even the branding of WordPress is a convoluted mess. I find myself time and time again explaining the difference between WordPress.com and self hosting the software itself.<p>So in the end you have a product that is too complex for a normal person (this is why squarespace or facebook pages do well) yet it's a platform that tech people feel is a bit of an old hack.<p>But what's sad to me is that this feels like a reflection of the dead end that the open web has become.