I've used WordPress for a personal blog since 2005. Over the years, I switched hosting, different versions of PHP / MySQL, upgrades to WordPress,... But one thi

I've used WordPress for a personal blog since 2005. Over the years, I switched hosting, different versions of PHP / MySQL, upgrades to WordPress,... But one thing I've never done was exporting all my content and then importing it in a fresh installation. Yes, I tinkered with SQL statements and I went through manual cleaning if an overzealous plugin didn't clean up properly after itself. But I never ran into the wall where the entire database got into an irreparable, unusable state. It's a simple blog. So, I've always tried to use plugins sparingly, and avoided massive database model changes if I could help it. But I like to think it wouldn't have been possible without the care put into WordPress upgrade path. At the same time, the focus on backward compatibility, to my mind, has held it back. Sure, innovation happened at the visible level, the surface level. New themes, new administration UI, Gutenberg, Blocks,... all of that have improved the author experience. But looking under the hood, the codebase simply isn't in line with modern PHP practices adopted by major PHP framework communities. Which leaves quite a lot to be desired for. Granted, part of the appeal of Wordpress is simply being able to grab the PHP files and (S)FTP them to a shared hosting. No need for complex CI, no need for composer, no need for complex configuration. That's what lowers the bars for many people who simply wanted their own self-hosted space on the Web. My other major gripe is how WordPress authoring experience evolved over time into a direction which I don't agree with. The editor in modern WordPress feels heavy handed: every item you add to an article morphs into a distinct component accompanied by a contextual menu with myriad options. I feel that this just gets in the way of what's actually important: writing. Personally, I like(d) the terseness of a simple textarea form element with limited affordances as to what you can add in terms of markup. Then again, the ambitions of Automattic are beyond simple writing and moved even beyond authoring and publishing. I think that's just par for the course and I don't fault them for that. It just has made WordPress less of a good fit for me over the years and that leaves me some with a sense of saudade. Either way, I owe a lot to WordPress. And I'm curious to see how it will evolve in the years to come.