Allow me to join the discussion here. Thank you for your remarks. I understand well where Gutenberg is heading. While I see the advantages it brings for some type of sites, as well as for site-building, Gutenberg is not (yet?) the solution for all of us.
You emphasize how blocks can be edited individually. True, for some type of content, this is nice and great. For other types of content, however, one wants to be able to edit the content of a post or page as a whole, and not as several individual blocks.
I see a solution, I am not the first one to mention it: it would be to make individual blocks flexible enough for incorporating (if one wishes to follow this path) all elements contained in a single post until now. Then one could select either to go for several blocks on an individual page or post, or to have a single block on another page or post.
But this can be done only once Gutenberg includes the ability either to add various elements as separate blocks, or to include all elements into a single block. For instance, as long as Gutenberg doesn’t provide the ability to insert images or other media at different places into a single block, it won’t work for most of my sites (I can only speak for myself, after testing Gutenberg, but it seems I am not the only one).
I am willing to give up the Classic Editor if something new brings more than what I have now. For the time being, however, for the type of sites I am publishing, Gutenberg would mean going one step back instead of improving my editing experience (I would possibly write otherwise if my sites had been conceived in a different way). Thus it is disturbing to read about users having no option but to prepare for a transition to the Gutenberg experience.
Maybe something needs also to be clarified here, and you might enlighten us about that, since what I have read until now is not very clear: what will happen in ten years from now to content published with WP as it has been until now? Will it still look the same, and will we keep the ability to edit old content without adjusting it to Gutenberg requirements? Posts that I am publishing today should remain accessible in ten years.
Over the past 18 months, I spent months of work moving to WP the content of several text-content websites formerly published in HTML or with other CMS. This means a total content of thousands of articles, some of them quite long, going back to 2002 for the oldest ones, carefully redirected one by one from the old URL to the new URL. Huge work, manual work for a large part… Those articles going back to 2002 are now on WP sites: I intend them to remain accessible in 2022, 2032… I am committed to permanent content and permanent links on my sites. Due its famed backward compatibility, I had become confident that WP was the ideal solution. But will it really be so in the post-Gutenberg world? I do not intend to edit those articles one by one in ten years because some people suddenly decide that the transition to Gutenberg should now be completed for all users. OK, I am willing to believe that you are responsible developers and that you do not want to see the hard work of editors vanishing in a few years due to “transition”. But I would like to read clear promises about that.
I do really see the point of nick3129 post. I do also see your point about the larger scope of the project. But for the editing segment, there should be a choice. If you commit yourselves to keep the Classic Editor (or similar solutions) as a permanent, lasting option, and not as a transitional one, fine: I might then use either editor, depending on my sites and their respective content. Otherwise, either blocks will evolve in such a way that they will be able to incorporate different types of editing experiences, including the ability to deal with complex post contents as a single block (and I hope that this will be the case) — or the time will sadly come for a WP fork, I am afraid…
