User blog comment:Kirkburn/The expanding world of the VisualEditor/@comment-24001421-20141003222730/@comment-126761-20141006132258

There are significant issues with the classic rich-text editor which the new VisualEditor is intended to (and already does) overcome - for example, the VE is much less likely to affect pre-existing wikitext, it can represent articles as they actually appear on the published page, and it is much easier for our to add features to.

We know it is missing some features the classic version has (something we're actively working on fixing), but it also has some features the classic version is missing, like proper reference support and various page setting options.

In any case, the classic rich-text editor is not going away soon.