Nice to see this question asked here. I answer because I owe gratitude to modx evo, for driving my sites for so long with so much success. And if evo would still continue to be updated and actively developed, maybe I would still stay or come back, let me explain.
For the last 7 years I have used evo on all my sites and it was absolutely great. I am not a designer, and not a programmer either, but I came to evo because it had such great capabilities in the seo field. I had people build templates for me around my wishes and as a result I had many many first place positions in the serps.
I had some wordpress themes ported to modx evo and played around with that. And all was really well. Until recently I ran into evo with php 5.4 trouble and that got me thinking. I then found the post you mention as well about marc hinse leaving modx evo for processwire (
http://www.mademyday.de/why-i-chose-processwire-over-modx.html) and that got me into looking into that.
Then I decided to have 2 sites ported to revo from evo, just to give it a try, because I need my sites to be future proof.
I hired a modx revo expert to port one evo design based on infinitescroll and masonry to revo and that got underway. I then also decided to take one other evo based site and have it ported to processwire, just to see how that would go.
Turned out the infinitescroll + masonry site could not be ported to revo, because it needed some logic that apparently revo did not have...
It is now being ported to proceswire as well.
The other site that was ported from evo to processwire incredibly quickly (by a guy who was contemplating moving from evo to processwire, he was not fluent with processwire yet, but ported the site in no time). I tested the living daylights out of it especially for speed and I added the processwire procache module (which is a paid module that overdelivers on speed and I am happy to pay, because it supports processwire development) It turns out it is the fastest site to date of all my sites. It even beats the html exported version of my modx evo site. Don't know why, but it just does.
Why not go for revo?
I was nervous about all the talk about the slowness and bloatedness of the revo manager and then I started seeing more and more talk on the cloud which to me does not make sense. I have my own servers and also vps and when I look for a server or vps I go and find the best that is available and for me that is freebsd and directadmin based. I fully understand the need for modx to make money, but why not make that money by providing commercial modules that speed things up or make life easier in stead of trying to make money with hosting in the cloud. Hosting is a totally different business and I thought modx was about simplicity and speed etc in a cms/cmf.
The last thing that triggered me away was all the talk about ambassadors, why should modx need ambassadors? Why not focus all the effort on making the product the best ambassador it can be?
I came to modx becuase evo was it's very own best ambassador and now I am moving my sites to processwire because processwire itself is the ambassador I hoped the next version of evo would be.
Processwwire is simple - now that a couple of my sites have been ported, I go in and check the templates and see how it works and boy is it easy. With evo I could work some stuff out with wayfinder and ditto, but this is much simpler, it seems closer to php, less of an extra templating engine, which explains it's speed partly.
I can now do again what I want and all works blazing fast. It feels the lead developer also is totally and singularly focused on making it work and do what people want it do do, and the majority seems to fall for simplicity, ease of use, speed, scalability and probably a lot more reasons.
So modx evo, kudos to what you were, thanks to all the modx evo guys and gals who made it into something terrific. I would have loved to stay and will keep an eye out on things, but for now I am leaving for proceswire - with sadness, because I say goodbye to a trusted friend.
Modx Evo Thanks for the beautiful ride it was!