[cmccomas]

I feel your pain. We have a WordPress network pushing 600 sites and I'm kind of concerned about the future of WordPress and think daily about migrating over to Drupal (or even exploring CascadeCMS or something along those lines).

When we picked WordPress back in ~2012 as our CMS it was because of how simple the editing of post/page content was compared to the alternatives. The majority of our content editors are student assistants, graduate assistants, least tenured faculty member, etc. People who aren't that technical and also have a dozen other things that are their actual job, unlike updating the departmental website which just got dumped on them.

We've done a ton of work with our theme and in-house plugins to keep WordPress super simple/basic for them, overwriting and undoing a lot of what core has added over the years. Most of the site editors find Gutenberg too complicated, so we're running the Classic Editor plugin in a ton of our sites. Our content editors just want to come to a CMS, have a text box where they can add content, add heading tags, links, images, use some of our shortcodes (from custom TinyMCE buttons) to add some styled components to their page. They don't want a full-site editor, they're not remotely qualified from a UI/accessibility perspective to be messing with anything really than just the base content of the page.

[amanzi]

Yep - great summary of my current position. I also use the Classic Editor plugin but still let users toggle the setting if they choose too.