> the codebase is really showing its age.
It's not age, it started very, very bad. If they'd fixed the horrible schema and the code a decade and a half ago, plugins would have been a lot easier to write (and a lot safer.)
Well, agreed, I just didn't want to completely shit on it.
There's a whole industry of people selling solutions to WordPress's failings, all of whom have strong incentives for it not be properly improved.
The plugin situation is a mess largely because Wordpress isn't a nice piece of software.
It's popular, and functionally it's great, but the codebase is really showing its age. Wordpress has never properly rearchitected because it would break plugins on a scale that would endanger its dominance.