the promise of blogging for me has always been
    the ability to have my own printing press and know
    that nearly everyone else in the world had access
    to one as well.

You say this and you are surprised that the average level of quality of published material went down? There's almost no way it could do anything else. There are a whole bunch of excellent blogs out there that wouldn't exist otherwise, and there is obviously a lot more communication nowadays. That's where you win: there's a lot more communication, some of which is excellent. Of course the average was higher when there was a higher barrier to entry, but that's not the important metric.

No reason to be sad -- imagine a platform that you can stay on whether you're posting pictures of your food to a few dozen people (as I do) or the NYT FiveThirtyEight blog covering the election, to all of Wired.com. That's democratizing publishing.

That's a great perspective and why I'm head over heels for WordPress as a platform for publishers of all shapes and sizes (and have built a company around it)

Then again, this versatility has its drawbacks. We're constantly challenged by the complexity of building a mobile viewport onto WordPress and present it in a way that makes reading, discussing and sharing this kind of content. The options for publishers are limitless and translating that to mobile in a way that makes sense is really non-trivial.

Mobile WordPress is not something that is going to be done and figured out in a day. As devices and peoples usage patterns evolve, over time we'll have to adjust to this as well. And while all of us take smart phones and tablets for granted now, only a small subset of this world's population has such devices to connect to the Internet. Many use much simpler phones and devices, and so to truly democratize publishing it can't stop with a fancy iOS app.

In core WordPress we'll track our progress and discuss over on the Make/Mobile blog. Feel free to chime in there! http://make.wordpress.org/mobile