Thanks Sarah. I completed the survey.

I appreciate that the Customizer devs asked for feedback and that they have thick enough skins that they can handle the sometimes negative feedback. It has come a long way. There are some premium themes that use it extensively to allow the customization of many design elements. It has the advantage of putting all those types of functions in one place, instead of each theme doing it their own way.

The visual editor/customizer is a challenge because of needing to account for all of the themes and plugins. The way it is developing has allowed them to iterate and make changes in stages. I think the future is front-end editing and that in some ways the Customizer is a proxy. That said, page builders and themes with front-end editing are moving at Internet speeds while the Customizer is moving much slower.

There are a number of plugins and themes that have features that could just be added to core, rather than build everything from scratch. For example, the Site Origin CSS editor, if they would donate it. I know that there is the conservative and cautious position that things should not be added unless the vast majority of users would use it, but everyone wants to be able to make their site fit their vision, so there is a lot of room to expand in this area.