The developer hostility in this is astounding.
"This is how developers keep themselves employed: by regularly clusterfucking your code."
Ummm, no. This is what happens when feature requirements are poorly communicated over a long period of time, combined with implementing every half baked or ill advised feature asked for by the marketing team. You know, stuff like "automated SEO using artificial intelligence".
I have worked on Magento, and agree that it is painful and convoluted, but it's a bit hard to believe that every single dev that has contributed to it was either stupid and/or malicious. Hopefully, moving to a community driven approach on 2.0 will actually clean up some of the technical debt and make the product more reliable, although it's more likely that it's just going to result in future feature adds coming from more numerous stakeholders with conflicting visions.
Hopefully the Magento management can manage all that input and stay focused. What they absolutely need to ignore is misguided and obviously clueless (or even malicious) feedback like this article.
> automated SEO using artificial intelligence;
A very fancy way of putting it, but something very common sense from a business perspective.
Even if the module providing a 'core' feature is written by Magento, it shouldn't be in the core project but should be treated just like any other 3rd party module.
Ultimately you want a core platform that is rock solid and extensible. That's what a good integrator then build out either from the low-end of just adding and configuring OTS modules to the high-end of bespoke modules.
We shouldn't be encouraging this shit, and we be giving the SEO 'experts'[1] the cold shoulder.
[1] About secret algorithms? Yeah, right.