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Comment by modernerd | Hacker News Reader

+1 I can concede that there are likely better technical implementations than where Gutenberg is at now. (Ghost's Koenig editor with the open block/card model is great, if much simpler and cutting corners by lacking Edge browser support and the ability to add custom cards.)

WordPress has always been a project where user happiness outweighs developer happiness, though, as much as I'd love for it to at least bring developer happiness inline. It will be interesting to see what the overall reaction is when 5.0 lands and the editor starts to become more widely used and accepted.

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Yes and I'll concede that Gutenberg has a lot of room to grow and will even make plenty of people happy straight away. But I wouldn't call this about user happiness outweighing developer happiness, I'd say it's the other way around. It's based on asserting that we know what the future user wants, not the actual users. Right now user happiness is skewing negative.

And Gutenberg's development is precisely characterised by developers/designers prioritising their own happiness. It's a small group of people working mostly at agencies and companies doing enterprise level work who took Matt's idea around blocks and feverishly adopted the tools they personally wanted to use while developing and making decisions at a pace more rapid than other contributors could cope with. That is in part why we lost the accessibility lead.

Just wanted to clarify one thing, that “we lost the accessibility lead.” There were no accessibility leads until one was designated for the 5.0 release. There were three self-appointed accessibility team reps, one of which decided to step back from the group and blog about it. “Team rep” is largely an administrative role, and as I said before it’s self-appointed. Some teams have 5+ reps, and historically they have not been approved by anyone in WordPress leadership, nor do they connote authority or skill.

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