I'm not all that deep in Drupal anymore, but from what I hear: I doubt it.

Drupal has to choose a target audience and focus on that. If they choose "developers", then it will become a great tool that is fun to develop in, no doubt.

But as long as it remains in a limbo between "end-users" (the one's browsing the site you are building), "webmasters/editors" (those managing the content and configuring tidbits) and "developers" this won't happen.

There are just too many conflicting interests there. Real use case: can a webmaster change some settings in the image-cache? certainly not! Changing the width of an image will break all your carefully crafted CSS grids: it is tightly coupled to the Theme (which lives in Git and goes through a release-cycle).

If Drupal chose "developers", a thing like "imagecache" won't even exist in its current set-up. It won't have a database to store its settings, nor a web-interface. Instead it would be an Image class that you can inherit and then define some settings and methods in order to get an image-derivative.

From what I've seen, Drupal 8 does not change this conceptual basis. So I highly doubt it is possible to develop sites when your basis is conflicting with what you want to do on such a crucial level.

On the one hand, if there's not a large market uptake of Drupal 8, there won't be any reason for community devs to learn all the new ins and outs when they could just learn the ins and outs of something smaller and simpler. On the other hand, if there's not a decent D8 developer pool for companies to hire from then I don't know how there could be a large market uptake...

Quite some people felt betrayed and were angry. Thing is, though, what I wrote was simply provable true. Backed up with numbers and such. So, I could conteract with "well, then show me what facts are wrong".

For myself, I felt relieved and a little sad. Sad that I could not achieve what I worked so hard for: to make Drupal the best framework for developers to build CMSes with.

The realisation that this was not going to happen, made me angry too. Untill the moment that I realised that pushing Drupal into a direction "it" did not want to go was frustrating. But also that, instead of turning Drupal into a Rails, I'd rather use Rails instead: why spend energy turning it into a framework that already exists, and that I can use today, without spending that energy. (I believe this mechanism is one of the greatest threats to WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and many other PHP-frameworks: once people grow into better programmers, they often simply leave, instead of pulling their framework up with them, to higher levels).