[calvinmorrison]

The problem space is huge. It's akin to LibreOffice, we have this huge amount of code, written by enterprises in complex ways, and the end user doesn't care, they just want it to work.

The backwards compatibility is really a challenge, but I think more importantly dumping Knockout and Luma and all that insanity and going towards the Hyva route, or going more-headlessy with a good starter theme would encourage people enourmously.

Magento's frontend cluster-F is the reason we moved away from it. It was great to have such a good pricing engine, integrations pieces, currency support etc, but all of that skillset which is magento's core capability being a really well rounded online OMS is overshadowed by long and expensive turn arounds on frontend work.

[damienwebdev]

Fully agree. The problems are hard, the interested talent is limited (who would want to work on line of business software when academia actively pushes people towards other things), and the problem space (all possible online business configurations) is immense.

Re:frontend, you're absolutely correct. Magento's frontend is a sad state. MageOS is actively looking for ways to move Luma/Blank into a separate installable package so that devs are not forced to see it at every turn.

In terms of Headless, there are a bunch of different heads at this point, but none have yet solved what I call the "upgrade-safe theme" problem.

I like what we've done with Daffodil since it doesn't impose any of those limitations that come with themes, while still handling a lot of the complexity that devs face when building ecommerce stores.

[calvinmorrison]

Ignoring academia - what's the value for a business minded tech person to stay in the Magento world? I'm surely not the only M2 tech lead type who's jumped ship off to greener pastures.

[damienwebdev]

Businesses will always have commerce problems, so you're pretty stable in terms of consistent income.

If you can make a name for yourself, you can do very well. Especially for Magento, I love the fact that I can make small change, deliver it as a composer package, and then (if the code is good enough) see the results on many brands within a few months.

It's hard to get that close-to-customer visibility anywhere else as most "cool" large scale FOSS projects are dev focused, which means your impact on the lay user is less obvious.