As someone who uses Wordpress daily at my job... Gosh I wish it would die already. Any sort of development is so damned painful. Things like VersionPress and Thermal API are making it less crap, but it's still so bad that we've been working on a way to inject Wordpress into Laravel (with a neat storage driver that will keep your mapped models in Wordpress' backend). It's made our latest project far simpler and more powerful.
As one of the developers of Thermal API, thank you for allowing us to make your WordPress dev experience a little less crappy ;)
I'm only slightly following the dispute between Automattic and WPEngine but it might have more to do with WPEngine rewriting the payment identifier on Automattic's open source Woo Commerce ecommerce plugin.
WPEngine's payment identifier rewrite results in WPEngine getting a cut of ecommerce payments processed through their hosted sites and not Automattic.
I don't know the details though and probably didn't even explain it right. Matt talked about it recently in a Youtube interview.