This is something people seem to miss. His position as CEO of Automattic creates a huge conflict of interest with his position at the non-profit foundation.
This is an example: the foundation's code gives special treatment to an Automattic product.
Were you aware of it and its relevance to this decision at the time you wrote the comment? My interpretation of your defence of it as just the CEO making a product decision was that you did not know. If you did know it seems to miss the point which is that he made a decision that was better for his company but worse for Wordpress.
It would be fine if Wordpress was developed by Automattic, but its not.
I was aware of it, but as an outsider, this actually seemed like a reasonable decision. Wordpress sites that allow external comments need some kind of comment moderation, lest they become instant spam cesspits. The CEO said hey, we're adding this section to feature suggested plugins, and we should add this long-time anti-spam plugin to it. In a vacuum, that looks fine to me. I'd rather see them emphasizing comment moderation than talking up a commercial add-on. Sure, this is a subscription they sell to businesses, so it's not a charitable work. It's one of the more defensible subscriptions I can think of, though.
And I really don't see it as worse for Wordpress. It's the kind of thing I think they should be recommending because it benefits the whole ecosystsem.
To be super clear, I am far, far from a Matt/Automattic (same thing) fanboy. I think this was a good decision in spite of my opinion of him, not because of it.
Some people have a view of open source contributors as some sort of amorphous mass of strangers, and that leads to unrealistic suppositions. The contributors aren't really amorphous, they exist, they're knowable, they have personalities and jobs.
A project such as wordpress(.org) depends very strongly on those who do the work. And in the case of Wordpress, that's some spare-time volunteers, some employees of other companies, but the biggest group is Automattic employees. If you do most of the work, as Automattic does, the project depends on you and you get to call the shots.
I understand that point, but I disagree. Automattic controls the process, which keeps a lot of initiatives out because there's no reasonable expectation of improvement unless it aligns with Automattic.
I don't believe the project would fold were Automattic to quit -- there's a lot activity outside of the core that is alienated by Matt's behavior. Might well be an improvement if the focus of .org isn't about what .com needs, but about what .org wants to offer to users.
This is an example: the foundation's code gives special treatment to an Automattic product.