In reply to Jordan.

Hey Jordan, some of your earlier comments above did make some sense.

You point out the keep it simple principle and I think that is why I think the feature was removed. Why? Because a) only a minority of users use the feature, b) new users are easily overwhelmed by too many settings, c) if a feature can be moved to a plugin, you make WordPress less bloaty and bloat is something lots of critics will argue over.

Beyond the keep it simple narrative, I think the setting options should encourage the best approach to these kinds of modifications, and generally this should be something set by the theme. Why? Because inline styles are out of the control of the theme and can then only be managed by editing the individual post. Your custom styled image may look good with your current theme, but when you switch themes it may look a lot worse. There is no way to easily make site wide adjustments to your image-specific inline styles.

But you do bring 2 legitimate points. Is the adding of, say an image border similar to using italic or bold on a word? I think you make a decent case with that. The second point, was that the play list feature is probably also one of those things that won't get used by a majority of users either and fits the 'plugin territory' use case. I don't disagree with you there, even though I think it's a rather cool feature to have. But then, core does make mistakes, or choices that in hindsight don't work out as well. But that too is part of evolving the platform we all use.

But hey, there are multiple plugins out there that add image controls for setting borders and the like: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-image-borders/, have you tried that? Actually, if you give those developers feedback, maybe a better way of dealing with image-specific style settings can be created.