I've had this niggling thought for a long time. An awkward thought "what is Gutenberg aiming to solve?". What are the goals, how do we know we have succeeded?
The official Wordpress statement : "The goal is to create a new post and page editing experience that makes it easy for anyone to create rich post layouts".

As a badly educated Dev I often ask about goals to find the most elegant solution - because it saves me effort, time and money.

The core of WP to me is the engine which sits processing code on the server, functions we can call which can be requested by any interface we dream up. The API, and WP CLI will translate any trigger we send from any interface: a visual interface trigger, a haptic trigger, a vocal trigger, ... all of these and more.

The old WP editor was a bad interface for the expanding core functionality and better interfaces DID need to be created - and the API and CLI are now powerful enough to do the grunt work of interfacing with the outside world. I'm sure we've all made a headless WP and a mobile phone app test. That seemed to be the future direction.

So - the official Wordpress goal : "to create a new post and page editing experience that makes it easy for anyone to create rich post layouts".

That doesn't say "make a drag and drop page builder" or "make a GUI page builder". It says the goal is to enable anyone to make rich post layouts".

What would be the most cost effective way to achieve that? A better rich post editor for everyone. Personally, for my own business I'd look to see if there's an existing visual editor using my API that I could license. No need to re-invent the wheel if somebody has made a wheel for my API.

Then I'd look to build other interfaces suitable for visually impaired, movement impaired. All my work would be on my API, and I'd capitalise on the community to create interfaces to that.

Instead ... and I'm sure I'm the idiot here ... the team seem to have focused on building a visual drag and drop block page layout editor which is less good than the competitors. A redundant and costly effort.

I can't see how this satisfies the stated kick-off goal elegantly and with lowest cost for highest value return.

To my mind this project and the goal satisfaction has been led astray by a current WebDev interests in SPAs, modern UI JS libs and trends in JS. I'm sure this looks great ona CV but the project management is ... lacking.

It seems technology led rather than goal led.

Of course, I'm probably missing something important here. I don't come from a technical CompSci background. I'm more of a "solutions" kind of person.