Interesting. I assumed Ghost was a dead project now as I hadn't heard about it in a while.

I don't doubt that Ghost is architecturally better than WordPress, but competing on features (or lack thereof) is a road to failure IMO. It is too easy to replicate the experience of using Ghost within WordPress. If Ghost's interface did turn out to be super popular, then a plugin would simply provide all of that functionality without users losing all of the benefits of being within the WordPress ecosystem.

I could easily see another project steam rolling WordPress via a superior architecture, but I have no idea if that could be Ghost.