> Once a good value Honda, WordPress now wants to be the high quality BMW.
This is the heart of it.
To extend the analogy further, they actually could take a page from the car industry. When Toyota and Honda and Nissan wanted to move from the value-for-money segment into the luxury-car segment, they invented new brands for those luxury products (Lexus, Acura and Infiniti, respectively) instead of trying to convince people that "Toyota" and "Honda" and "Nissan" stood for something different today than they did yesterday. And this strategy has been quite successful, letting them grow into a new market without undercutting their hard-won position in the old one.