I suppose I'm just unconvinced about the severity of the "conflict of interest" claims, which have been said by quite a few people in these threads (I don't mean to single you out in any way!) but without concrete, unambiguous examples rising to the level of clear wrongdoing or malicious intent.

I know you gave some examples alleging bad behavior up-thread, but in those cases it isn't clear that the specific core problem related to a conflict of interest with Matt having dual roles at Automattic and the Foundation.

Or for instance, regarding "the good of WordPress": my impression is that Matt's various organizations are by far the largest contributors to WP core development, so it's hard to argue an overall trend of not acting in the best interest of WordPress. Stated another way, if Automattic were to go out of business, WordPress development would be significantly impacted. I think this means "the good of WordPress" and "the good of Automattic" are synergistic and intertwined.

At the end of the day, developing and maintaining a major open source project is very expensive. Someone needs to pay for it, and when a majority of that cost is paid by a single entity, that entity will naturally have disproportionate control. If major ecosystem members aren't contributing their share (as is alleged in WPE's case), I don't see how an entirely community-driven approach would be successful.

To be clear though, with respect to WP's situation, I don't have a dog in this fight and am neither condoning nor condemning the behavior of the parties involved.