In reply to Amanda.

Amanda, I suspect for you I may be preaching to the choir, but for the benefit of others who are following along... Many WordPress themes have both an "Aside" and "Status" post format available. In my experience, few if any, WordPress themes ever did much differentiation between an aside and a status. As a result I typically view them as the same for all intents and purposes. In fact, other than Matt's blog, I don't think I've run across another aside in the wild in the past year. I once added microformats to my theme's handling of post formats, but doing that will only get you so far--I quickly realized why David Shanske essentially started from scratch. I think that the Post Kinds Plugin does a much better job of differentiating the types of posts one would/could want to make, so I now rely on that for most of my content. It also has the benefit of being more extensible than post formats have been.

More often than not it always seems when I hear about Post Formats, it's a mention that they're eventually going away and may not be supported in the future. It always felt to me that they were thrown into core just to compete with Tumblr. Instead of building on them and continuing to innovate, WordPress has left them to rot on the vine. If they had kept up with them, I suspect they'd have something much more akin to what the Post Kinds Plugin is now. (And if they added webmentions, they'd now be stealing serious market share from Twitter and Facebook.)

Like you, my fervent wish is that WordPress core supported all of the more modern Microformats version 2 vocabulary instead of relying on themes to implement them (often improperly). As an aside (pun intended!), I'll also add my regular public service reminder/admonishment to those who write CSS to never target microformats classes in their themes! Microformats are there for semantic use only and not for CSS or other use!