While I think dropping some of the image features from WordPress could have been dealt with in a better way, it's hard to read the complaints. The complaints are very self-centered to be honest and argue from the point of view how a feature change has impacted them without making any effort to understand the bigger picture or understand all the changes that were made and why they were made.

Some people are making it sound like WordPress took a step back or that the developers are making changes just to make changes.

First of all, these features can be added back in with a plugin. Problem solved. Yes it's an inconvenience to have to install and research a plugin.

And don't say that plugins make WordPress slower (@webismuk) because it amounts to having the code for dealing with these features live in another folder. The difference is immaterial (unless the plugin is really poorly coded). Meanwhile, WordPress has gotten a little less bloaty with a feature a large portion of the userbase does not use.

I think it's unfortunate that this issue makes some people lose sight of the advances WordPress has made just in this last release. To me this really was one of the best releases to have ever come out. But sometimes there are short term pains for a portion of users, for long term gains. That's unavoidable with any software.

Take the WordPress editor. It has gone through a major update in this release. It has always been a major point of complaint by people. But this update (notably, the upgrading to a much improved version of TinyMce) provides a better foundation. Lots of plugins that interact with the editor may have had issues with this release, especially if they weren't testing against upcoming updates (which they could have by following developments actively). So there was going to be some chaos with some plugins.

But to improve the experience for the community at large and make WP better, you have to make these kind of choices. Arguing for keeping things the way they were is tantamount to saying that WP should become outdated and die and not address problems other people are having and stop making a better platform. It's hard to take some of these complaints and not think they are a tad self-centered in that regard.