Great analysis and suggestions, Hendrik.

Personally, I’ve always felt that WordPress was too focused on building sites and publishing content, and not enough on site operation (security, backup, updates, etc). Going in the other direction, many plugin/theme coding standards (e.g. autoloading & security), page optimisation and caching aren’t part of core, for some reason.

Unfortunately, just like in any modern democracy, those with money also yield power, and the only way for the rest of the people to change anything is by uniting, which is getting more and more unlikely by the day 🙁

It’s hard to blame companies that contribute for serving their own interests, really. In exchange, the rest of us get free software that’s actually pretty good. So we shouldn’t forget this aspect either. Personally, I still see WordPress as the best free & flexible option out there, and I sincerely hope this will remain so for a long time.