I think it makes sense to branch this off into a proper discussion. The concept and visuals of Ghost strike me as a brilliant idea, but I would like to "debate" the use of Wordpress as a core. Stripping the bloat from Wordpress would probably take longer than building a clean, new platform that appeals to the same developers by using open initiatives like symfony, Twig templates and composer packages.

However the other option is that you'd already have access to a huge community of developers who would be very familiar with the platform and the fact that you could integrate already existing plugins/ideas into the core because you'd have a large community to work from.

I agree that this has huge benefits. If it were to go down that road, I think it would have to be a fresh app that has "support" for Wordpress Plugins and Themes. I would prefer just to support the Themes because the plugins would be a headache since a large portion of them involve dashboard changes and functionality that wouldn't be compatible with Ghost.

Agreed, and it wouldn't really be that hard to integrate the themes, since a lot of them call standalone functions which could easily be mimicked in Ghost to perform similar functionality.

I wonder if you could build a new platform and just use a "mapping" function that could map all WP theme calls to their equivalents. Just map the query to the new loop object, etc. It would be tough, but I would prefer to see a fork of Wordpress use modern technology too.