Have you seen Jeff Chandler’s post at Weblog Tools Collections ? The one called Stop Blaming The WordPress Team and the comments thereof?
Oh my goodness, what a fine, unique and wonderful thread they have going there which is something that tends to be rather rare. The arguments are so well stated and personal jabs are at a minimum as compared to other such other “high energy” conversations I’ve seen over the years and absolutely entertaining as well (yes, I’m being serious, not sarcastic 
).
The premise:
Jeff takes on the age old problem of people who think WordPress is to blame any time an upgrade breaks one of their plugins, causes massive problems when upgrading from an ancient version of WordPress to the latest version when they didn’t bother to keep their install up to date in the first place (a very bad practice) and, of course, the old saw of too frequent a release schedule which has been heard almost since the very first new version of WordPress was put on the streets regardless of the frequency of any past release schedule.
The commenters range from those who believe that WP site owners (the self hosted type) have total responsibility for their site (yes, they do) including having to learn PHP, CSS, all FTP protocols and commands, Cron jobs and plowing through the code of every plugin they want to install looking for malicious code or any mistakes before installing etc, etc, (no, they don’t actually and deep breath) to those who believe that the WordPress developers are the ones responsible for “ease of use” in administering a WP powered site, making the Codex easier for the beginner to use, making sure that all plugins are compatible with the next version etc, etc, ad infinitum.
The post gets right down to the point or points as the case may be and his take on subject is as close to the mark as you could get in my opinion but I doubt Jeff expected the near 200 comments (currently) that followed and more are still coming in.
If anyone wants a (almost) real time, up close view of the most classic WordPress argument being batted around in a surprisingly amicable manner and for what may be a fine learning experience for those newer WordPress bloggers as well, I strongly suggest you check this out for yourselves.
Wow Kirk, excellent writeup. Thanks for partaking in the discussion. I had a feeling that the post would generate a lot of comments. What I didn’t know was how many of them were going to be flaming comments or huge argument starters. As it turns out, the discussion has been pretty good and the comments have provided to be a good source of learning for me as I’ve seen arguments stated for both sides. I’d say, quite a few ideas for how to improve things all around from the way the core team handles plugin compatibility to release frequency. In fact, some of the comments have generated ideas for future posts
Hey Jeff,
Glad you liked the post and thanks. Of course you caught me in the middle of a bit of online editing (bad habit of mine) but I think you got the gist of it. I did intend to join in the discussion more than I did but the reading thereof got the best of me as well as triggering a the writing of this post, something I have to immediately act upon or I lose it (that getting older thing
).
The discussion that followed your post is probably the best I’ve seen yet and even the few flames that peppered the various threads here and there were an interesting read if not downright entertaining. I especially enjoyed the discourse between Robert and Richard, those two should be working together if you could keep them from strangling each other before they could accomplish anything. The whole thing (post and comments) should be saved for future “do-it-yourselfer’s” to refer to in both example and as a damn good learning experience. And it gave me some ideas for future subjects as well. This is the kind of discussion that makes things happen and I’m very glad you took the time to “grab the bull by the horns” as it were. Great job, Jeff!