More important things to focus on

Thank you for the review, @strid3r!

You’ll be pleased to hear that work continues on other areas of WordPress while Gutenberg is being built. The security team fixes Core issues as needed, and we’re also looking at ways to improve the security of the wider WordPress ecosystem. Automated scanning tools like Tide will allow us to notify plugin and theme authors of potential issues before they’re exploited.

By itself, WordPress has reasonable SEO, but much like many other areas, using a plugin dedicated to SEO ensures that you get the most up-to-date best practices, rather than waiting for Core releases.

Speaking of SEO, several folks from Yoast are quite excited about applying SEO feedback at a block level, it has the potential to give you much finer control over your content, control that just isn’t possible in the current editor.

Finally, I do disagree that this is about “$”. From a user perspective, Gutenberg provides a modern, fast, flexible experience that site builders and content creators expect. From a developer experience, Gutenberg unifies how we treat data across the entire site, making it modular, and aligning the various APIs.

I’ll also add that Gutenberg is going to be completely free, open source, and bundled with core, so it’s hard to draw a line between it and making money.

If you mean that it’ll allow less technically able or proficient users to be able to create a site using WordPress than could before, that is definitely a goal. Part of the hope in investing so much time in Gutenberg is it does bring us closer to our goal of “democratizing publishing” and encourages more people to join the free and open web that WordPress enables instead of publishing on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Medium, or one of the proprietary site builders that are out there.

To the extent more WP users means more money inside the community, that’s probably true to the extent it drives adoption in countries with more disposable income, but the great news is that will flow to all corners of the WordPress ecosystem and create new opportunities for everyone from developers to agencies to add-on sellers to hosts.