[noeltock]

I think you answered your own question, the familiarity for users (seo & content) which is "end-to-end no-code" is massive (especially once extended with user-facing plugins). And you're not even speaking about making the move to Gutenberg yet. Just too much value there.

[luckylion]

Yeah, certainly, but that's what I meant to address by making your framework's backend look & feel like WP and adding e.g. shortcodes to it and having a media library that works the same way (but doesn't suffer from WP's clunky bolted-on attachment).

Gutenberg isn't a thing for the folks I work with, nobody there likes freedom (freedom only leads to errors!), everything is form-based (ACF is slow but it works, and here, too, it's not users setting up the fields, it's developers) with a few shortcodes to pull in special elements.

I'm not complaining, I like building tools and solving problems and using WP allows for plenty of both, but in hindsight WP is slowing us down, I believe. Of course, it's hard to predict the scale of things when you start, so having something you can quickly iterate with is useful.

[minusf]

what familiarity? every single plugin's dashboard/admin page looks completely different.

[tehbeard]

Somewhat of a facetious argument, like saying the posts and site settings pages look completely different.

It's not to say there aren't some that say sod it and have their own UI library. But quite a few leverage wordpress admin styles and conventions (such as the wp_list_table).

But the quality is all over the place, much like with composer packages.