There's a mantra in the WordPress development community: decisions, not options. It's meant to be a standard to which you hold any interface design decision: if you make a decision for users it'll ultimately be better than forcing them to make decisions themselves. It's a decent mantra — if you're not mindful you'll end up with feature creep and UI complexity, and it's orders of magnitude more difficult to remove an old option than it is to add one in the first place. Adding an option instead of making a decision for the user is almost always bad UI design.
Except when it's not.
The problem with a mantra like this is that it quickly gets elevated to almost biblical status. When used by a disgruntled developer it can be used to shoot down just about any initiative. Like Godwins law for WordPress: once you drop the "decisions not options" bomb, rational discussion comes to a halt.
The thing about open source development is that it's much like natural evolution: it evolves and adapts to changes in the environment. Unfortunately that also means features once useful can become vestigial once the problem they used to solve becomes obsolete. Baggage like this can pile up over years, and maintaining backwards compatibility means it can be very difficult to rid of. Sure, "decisions not options" can help cauterize some future baggage from happening, but it's also not the blanket solution to it.
The problem is: sometimes the right decision is unfeasible, therefore beckoning an option in its absence. WordPress is many things to many people. Some people use it for blogging, others use it for restaurants, portfolios, photo galleries, intranets, you name it. Every use case has its own sets of needs and workflows and it's virtually impossible to make a stock experience that's optimal for everyone. Most bloggers would arguably have a better experience with a slew of WordPress features hidden or removed whereas site owners might depend on those very same features for dear life. By catering to many use-cases at once, user experiences across the board are bound to be unfocused in some way or other.
The "Screen Options" tab is an example of a feature that would probably not exist were "decisions not options" taken at face value. Screen Options exists on the idea that not everyone needs to see the "Custom Fields" panel on their Add New Post page, yet acknowledges that some users will find that feature invaluable. It is an option added in absence of a strong decision, for example, to limit WordPress to be a blogging-only tool. I consider it an example of an exception to the mantra for the good of the user. Sure, the UI could use some improvement, let's work on that, but I really appreciate the ability to hide the "Send Trackbacks" panel.
I'm a fan of WordPress. I'm a fan of good decisions, and I'm a fan of good UI design. I believe that if we relieve ourselves of arbitrary straitjackets and approach each design objective with a sense of good taste and balance, we can make excellent open source software. Cauterizing entire avenues of UI simply because it adds options, however, negates the fact that sometimes those options exist in absence of a higher-up decision that just can't be made for whatever reason.