In reply to George Stephanis.

This is more of a last mile, or more like first mile, issue. Automattic is exploiting its position - both in the market and within the broader product ecosystem - in order to gain what feels like an unfair advantage.

That said, the WP market is overly fragmented and too often filled with noise and nonsense (crap code, buggy products, wonky UXs, etc). How past "leadership" decisions helped foster this is another chat for another day. Let's not go there right now. Perhaps this will lead to a better experience for the majority of users? But at what cost to everyone else? If new devs sense the best opportunities within the World of WP are past then they will look to other platforms, platforms that apprear to have more longer term up side.

So yeah, this might be good for Automattic today but over the longer term it could be a shot in the knee - the foot already being long gone :)