Some general comments, to whom…
I have been using Wordpress since 2004, when I switched from Movable Type. For a while the improvements were actually that, then stuff like Jetpack and being tied to wordpress.com was questionable, but I understood ya gotta make money and stuff still worked.
I had one issue with auto-update, client site was blank white after it tried to do it unsupervised. After fixing the site manually I found the code to enter in wp-config and disabled that on all sites.
I sent Mullenweg a nastygram when I received a “how we doing?” email from the mothership not long after that happened. We had a short discussion and my point was that not only did it fail but it failed to tell me it failed, no warning emails came. I had to check in to find out anyway, so what was he saving me?
The answer being that there’s a chart somewhere showing how many sites are running the latest version and he wanted better numbers and users got burned because of that auto-update push.
Time went by, then apparently they changed the code needed to disable auto-updates somewhere in 5.x and I missed that memo. so the last few updates happened without my express permission.
And things broke. Again without warning. Including plugins I depend on.
What I saw in 5.x and up was further movement toward the Google methodology of tromping forward singing the happy wanderer lustily without looking down and not listening to single users and rethinking everything just because they’re bored and want to look cool to their peers.
It looked to me like all the “innovations” were for corporate clients and pros. All the new stuff did was get in my way and make plugins I rely on obsolete for no reason.
And then the day came when the Widgets panel just stayed blank and I needed to work on a site. Because I dislike and distrust Google, I won’t use Chrome or let Chromium call home. The blank widgets panel made me think of Google making up new web stuff that only works on Chrome, it felt like being excluded.
The blank widget panel was the final straw. 4.9 is a fairly happy place in my view, and rethinking needs to be done with great care and lots of time passing for consideration.
I’m really happy with Classic Press. When I was thinking of making my own fork, and BTW I do not have any programming skills, I was going to call it NoGu, for No Gutenberg. But this name is fine with me, I don’t care as long as it works and I can easily get things done, which in my case is uploading some photos, posting them along with some writing if needed, and being done. Out the door to take more photos or work on writing.
When the WP Support person started going on about looking through logs, yep I can do that, but I’d rather post my work. That makes me happier than diagnosing dysfunctional crap that was forced on me.
If we can, please, remember that people use this as a tool for an objective. I love tools and playing with versions, if you want someone to test V2 builds I have very content-light installs that I will use to help try things out, access to the file side, and modest database skills.
But I also have working installs that I depend on. Thank you for bringing back the joy of creation.