if this goes live I’m leaving wp for good

From a content entry view, this is a really clunky, inconsistent interface. My users enter large volumes of content. Gutenberg with its block system will really slow them down for entry, editing and review. They don’t need to design new looks for posts and pages. (In fact, we need to enforce a consistent look and feel via themes, so we don’t want our users to have lots of design flexibility).

I am going to face a major revolt by my users. Even the ones who want to keep using it will require a lot of training. The learning curve will be much higher for new users than with the existing editor.

And this doesn’t even include the cost of rewriting our extensive set of custom plug-ins.

A lot of us revolt because we’ve had enough wisdom with our clients to know this is a bad idea. WordPress core devs are devs deving for devs.

Building a site for a client / end user (the final target audience of the devs that the core devs are deving for) is a lot different. My clients don’t want to drag and drop and move things around. They don’t need a page builder.

They need and want a clean, clear, concise way to edit documents in the same way they use software like MS Word / Google Docs, etc.

Gutenberg’s seeming target market is DIY business owners who are using services like Wix. They kinda want to design their site themselves, but don’t know a lot about development, computational logic, and the like. Drag and drop. Move things around. Save. BOOM.

Another target seems to be entry-level developers who are just a couple view-sources above homeboy over there crankin’ out a quick 4-pager for he and his cousin’s lawn mowing gig.

More seasoned, experienced, and wiser developers can easily see this from a 30,000ft view and how it will directly affect their clients, the final end-users behind the site’s entire purpose.

Visitors aren’t seeing this change. It’s all back-end. Integrating Gutenberg with core is a terrible idea and will prove to be disastrous if it actually gets forced in 5. KISS, and IIABDFI.

If you insist, please for the love of all things sacred in web development, keep this as an OPTIONAL, off-by-default plugin.

The resulting trainwreck for doing otherwise will be a disaster that will cause many a headache, whisky barrels of coffee to scramble together patches when TSHTF, lost profits, unpaid bills, hungry kids, breakups, and may even save a couple people from getting fired.

Please think about this and be wise in your decision to rock the boat this hard. Trying to fix what isn’t broken rarely turns out anything fractionally as good as how it was in the first place.

Clients used to revolt against iphone’s touch screen. look at where we are now.

Sorry, but this is just one example. People have revolted against plenty of other things that fell by the wayside just because the alternatives were so much better.

If Gutenberg works so well for you and your clients, that’s fine—make it a plugin, because it clearly will not work well for the rest of us. (BTW, if it works so well for your clients, be prepared to watch them walk away because they don’t need you anymore.)

@pursuitforjustice You can disable Gutenberg via this plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/