I agree with you – WordPress is often criticised within the tech community. That's because its philosophy has always been to optimise for end-user happiness first and developer happiness second. If you think something in WordPress is crazy – such as supporting PHP 5.2 – the reason is normally that it may be worse for developers, but it is much better for end-users. As soon as I understood and accepted that, I had much more fun with WordPress.

But I think the criticism in the tech community is also a cry for a strong alternative. And we have so few good ones today. That's why I'm happy to champion and celebrate anyone taking on an entrenched platform. If nothing else, Ghost and competing platforms will encourage WordPress to become something even better.

Some responses to your comments:

Right, so what happens when your needs grow and you need functionality that extends outside of the envelope of Ghost?

You'll install Ghost apps, just as you install WordPress plugins like Advanced Custom Fields if you want to bend WordPress into a more feature-complete CMS. It's too early to say whether Ghost will succeed at creating a better add-on system, so perhaps this particular debate is premature. The challenge will be in creating an API that allows developers to bolt-on features without also enabling UI cruft and the sort of performance headaches and conflicts you see with WP plugins, which don't enforce sane practises like namespacing (thanks, PHP 5.2!).

Ghost may be "easier to use" but one thing that is difficult with it over WordPress is it's a lot harder to install - requires Node.JS which doesn't run on most shared accounts (where most people host blogs). The average non-technical person shouldn't be trying to manage a VPS or server.

I agree with you – at the moment the install process is too hard for non-technical users and a burden for technical ones. But the official Ghost hosting platform is inexpensive, easy to get started with, and happy to accept custom themes, so there is little reason for most users to look elsewhere. Those who want to host a blog themselves already have several alternatives that don't require sysadmin skills – WebFaction has a Ghost installer, for example, and they charge shared-hosting prices ($9.95/month). I suspect we'll see other suppliers who offer Ghost-only hosting to bloggers with lots of traffic, just as WP Engine and others have done with WordPress.

Most plugins don't abuse the addition of menu items - most of the ones that create a new root-level menu item do so because they have sophisticated/deep enough configuration that requires it. I'm not sure that added menu items makes WordPress particularly "difficult to use" especially if the alternative is that functionality isn't available in the first place.

The problem is that these menu items can be created in at least three different areas – under Settings, under Tools, and at the top level. This makes things harder for users because they have to remember where the menu item of the configuration page for that plugin they installed four months ago is. I use WordPress every day and the menu system is a giant game of hunt-and-peck.

The menu setup also makes things harder for developers because they have to make the right choice of where their menu item will live. A great many get it wrong. (They will frequently place items at the top level that should have been under Settings or Tools.)

Additionally, the menus API invites games of Competitive Menu Trumping, where developers fight to get their menu item above those of other developers. Automattic are guilty of this – install their Jetpack plugin and you'll find a new "Jetpack" menu item right at the top of the menu bar, just below Dashboard: http://d.pr/i/AZyt This is either a desperate call for attention or an admission that the menu system is broken – that if it was placed under the Settings header instead, the Jetpack settings page might never be found.

Plugin author "WingerSpeed" has even created a plugin named "Slim Jetpack" that functions almost exactly like Jetpack, but removes the menu item and banners from the top of the page. It's been downloaded almost 50,000 times – nowhere near the 10 million or so downloads that Jetpack itself has, but still a sign that menu bar bloat, dashboard adverts, and enforced sign-ins are complications and annoyances that many users would prefer not to have.

WordPress's /wp-admin/ can be super fast - that's down to where you are running it.

I don't think it's just down to hardware – WordPress is not yet a full MVC-style JavaScript app. Side-by-side, it does not feel as fast as Ghost on the front or back end. I just logged into an account I managed with one of the big WP hosts, and it's a huge improvement over how it feels with shared hosting, but if you compare it side-by-side with a Ghost blog it feels slower. Perhaps that's a little unscientific and anecdotal, but raw perception matters. To be fairer, Ghost's perceived speed is largely because it got a fresh start and doesn't carry 10 years of baggage, but also because it does less and makes fewer requests (11 vs 18 for the basic admin page). But the upshot is that it behaves more like a modern front-end JS app than WordPress currently does (even though that's changing) – the perceived performance mirrors the underlying architectural choices.

Drafts are saved automatically and with browsable history so the need for Command-S is removed.

Auto-save is great. I agree that this is better for users. My point was that, for writers and users with muscle-memory Command+S twitches like me, the fact that the shortcut triggers a save action instead of a browser menu shows that the app's been developed to feel more like a desktop one. It's a nice touch. (I believe the WP post editor disables Command+S when the box has focus, so it's not like they haven't thought of it – it's just a different approach.)

Materially, that's no different to the WordPress Foundation.

Absolutely. Except that the Ghost Foundation is just the Ghost Foundation. There is no commercial arm like with Automattic – no for-profit company feeding from the work of open source contributors (and giving a lot back, to be fair). Most won't care or appreciate the difference, but it's an important distinction for some.

Pricing for official WordPress hosting is even more reasonable - free.

Sure, it's free if you want to use a modified version of WordPress. It's free if you don't need to add plugins or themes. It's free if you don't need to edit CSS. It's free if you don't want to use your own domain. Once you add the various upgrades or one of their (very decently priced) bundles, and once you pay for separate email hosting (which WP.com doesn't include), you'll soon be looking at shared hosting pricing or the headache of migration to a self-hosted setup. It's great that there's a free entry point, but perhaps sometimes that can turn into more of a burden than a benefit. Ghost Pro has a free full-featured trial, for what it's worth.

But also has a clear path to scalability via various Managed WordPress Providers if needs be.

Ghost Pro offers a clear upgrade path that scales based on traffic, just as managed providers like WP Engine do: http://d.pr/i/SWHO If you start with them you can grow with them too.

The "Upgrade to Pro" part is a bit of a straw-man argument. I'm sure there must be some WP plugins that do that but not many, and any widget on the Dashboard can be easily moved or removed. Users can customize their dashbord with what they want, and a reasonable counter-perspective would be that a small RSS feed of WordPress news and articles isn't a negative.

It's not a straw-man argument – it's a genuine problem. I started collecting screen shots of the Dashboards and various intrusive banners from Dashboards I've logged into over several years of web consulting and it paints an ugly picture. (I'll try to publish them in the future if I can strip identifying features.)