As for Blogger, there’s a big problem, and its that Google owns your blog. It can be deleted at any time, as was demonstrated by the case of iMessengr. I can’t imagine losing all my hours of hardwork(on my blog) to some stupid error by Google.

Also, you seem to be unaware of the tweaks for WordPress. They’re easy, and there are guides for starting. Even I did some tweaks for speeding up the blog: http://www.techzilo.com/optimise-site-blog/

Also, once you use WP, the superior extendability will grab your attention. There’s a plugin or hack for everything, and its open-source, so you hackers can use the backend code to come up with even more hacks. I remember Ramani once lamented that Blogger should add PHP support. And WP has it…

Clear leader – Blogger? You’ve got to be kidding me. I have used Blogger a lot, especially New, and can now say comfortably that WordPress is ahead, though Blogger is catching up. As for hackers doing all to catch up, its because WordPress hackers laid out all the ground work(via plugins) much before Blogger did.

As for hosting, you can start with a basic pack costing $2-$5, which can handle ~500 visitors per day. And when you hit the mark, buy bandwidth(as low as $0.5/GB. If you want details, IM me!

Somehow, I still love Blogger, probably because all my mods/hacks were made for Blogger. I’m still impressed by the idea of the amount of tweaking you can achieve in Blogger, literally for free.

Wordpress, on the other hand, comes with a cost. It is free. But as I once mentioned, it needs a web space to be running in its full glory, and web space doesn’t come for free. The wordpress.com version, as you know, doesn’t allow you to edit your templates or add custom plugins.

But the very fact, that Blogger hackers are trying to achieve the level of functionality that Wordpress offers, hints who is the clear leader!
I respect Wordpress. But I can’t use it. Not until I get out of my thrift and shell out some money to buy some web space for myself.

About others, I don’t know

Wordpress can only change future versions, so whatever version of WP that I’m running at the time would continue to be mine to run on. That gives me loads of time to migrate to another platform.

As for Feedburner, I use MyBrand, so my feed’s URL is on my own domain. If Feedburner disappeared tomorrow, the only thing I’d lose are my stats.

As for MT, yeah, its getting better, but with Perl scripting, and ancient features even now, its going to take some time before they get on level terms with WP.

2. I doubt we’ll have a problem with Wordpress going paid. Movable Type did that, and Wordpress took over. The MT guys are finally seeing reason and starting a public version now, and they’re working like mad to keep up with Wordpress. If WP went paid-only, MT would take over as the standard. They even allow you to import WP databases into MT. I’m not worried, the WP devs aren’t that stupid.