it still blows my mind that they haven't implemented a more user friendly editor.
When someone goes through the trouble of creating a well-cited article only to have it deleted for being 'not notable', they're unlikely to bother again. If there's a Wikipedia issue to resolve, it's the deletionists and the strange environment which encourages their behaviour.
The FAQ entry linked ( http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/What%27s_new,_questions_... ) has a lot more info than the announcement, the primary entry there is:
Why are you making these changes?
Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation are written and edited by volunteers. When knowledgeable people cannot participate in editing Wikipedia because they find it too confusing or difficult to edit articles, it is a serious problem that undermines the potential quality, breadth and depth of the content that we can offer to you. In other words, even if you don't contribute content, the easier we can make it for knowledgeable people to join our projects, the more useful our resources become to you.
So it seems they're really focusing on making the editor user friendly.
They also say that this is only the beginning of a series of changes.
Yes, they consider users to be potential contributors.
For what it's worth, personally my own edits seem to stick around - I write a lot about architecture (buildings), industrial design, and software. I've written about Ron Arad, Konstantin Grgic, Zaha Hadid, btrfs, SystemTap, Python, Django, Zed Shaw, and popular culture in Portland, and they've all still there. I appreciate you may have had different experiences.
The lead on WikiEditor (Trevor Parscal) just did a presentation at PARC. If you want to learn more about the tradeoffs you can watch that video.
http://www.parc.com/event/1108/how-wikimedia-is-scaling-open...
We know that it doesn't look that different, but there are several big reasons for that.
The grant for this project was time limited, and the low-hanging fruit about usability turned out to be a lot more about organization and cleaner design. A lot of people just couldn't even find the edit button.
In any case, despite looking more or less the same, there's a much, much better jQuery-based system under the hood now, and it's on a much better foundation for adding features. Years of cruft have been cleared out.
The User Experience team is now a permanent aspect of the WMF, so we can start thinking about longer term ideas. WYSIWYG might be one of them. Stay tuned. Or, check us out -- our process is very, very open, and anyone can voice their concerns.