I don't think wordpress is becoming less user friendly although it's never been friendly to newbies.

My biggest gripe is that sensible projects that could make its so much better are not being tackled. Things like backpress, post to post relationships in core, or cleaning up the ridiculous wp db schema are not being tackled. These projects would make wp a better cms AND a better blogging engine. But they are not on the roadmap.

You can bet wp's competitors are tacklings these sort of issues..