What 3 features are missing/would you add to WordPress to make it a better solution for business use?

I'm one of those who think WordPress is pretty good as it is. But since you asked, here's some things I wouldn't mind seeing: (much) Better on-site search. WP's on-site search is horrible. I would be nice if the search function was at least good, if not great. Definitely something to work on. Site caching. Sure there's some great plugins for this but I think this feature should be in the core of WP. That way not every piece of content requires a server call. Customizable user roles. Be nice to be able to set what user can do beyond the five default roles. A form builder. Again, some great plugins. But forms are such an integral part of having a website why not include a form builder in WP's core? Customizable sidebars. Would be nice if one could create multiple widgeted sidebars and then select which pages/posts you want which sidebars to show up on. Some themes and plugins do this, and it would be a nice addition to the core for biz sites. Come to think of it, I think #5 is essential for having greater flexibility and control over your site and its content. Could probably think of more, but these are good for now.

Good question and excellent answers. Of them all, I think James Hilton's suggestion of a standard structure for theme development is the long overdue. Native site caching (Dawud Miracle) would be my second vote, followed by Faisal Khan's suggestion of a way to bundle settings and plugins for uploading to a newly created site. It can be SO tedious to do this by hand. There ARE plugins that perform almost all of these functions, but too many plug-ins can get you a crazy tower of Babel, with some plug-ins interfering with or breaking other plug-ins. I'd love to see the most-used functionality -- cache, forms,etc. -- built into the core.

I've recently become a convert to Action Hooks. In previous WP projects, I've just edited the templates--effective and simple but prone to breaking with theme updates. Action hooks are incredibly powerful and so much easier than they first appear. I'd love to see some sort of Dashboard interface for them. Ideally, it would list which ones are available to the installed theme and would have checkboxes for removing particular hooks and fields for modifying them (hopefully without the reverse PHP starts and ends that are needed for the functions.php file). The other thing I'd love to see is some sort of simplified interface for child themes. I used Thematic for my last project but it took some mental gymnastics on my part to understand how child themes and action hooks  combined and where I should be putting everything. Simplifying all this into a 5 minute install with a Dashboard interface could be really fabulous for developers new to WordPress.

SecurityWordPress has made a lot of strides in improving their security, and they are always quick to release updates in response to a vulnerability. But some of the very basics are missing from the core WordPress: limit login attempts force renaming the admin user force better default file permissions and .htaccess configuration disable file editing in the admin CachingI can't begin to count the number of times a WordPress site is taken down because it was posted to Hacker News or Reddit or mentioned in a news article. WordPress performance is terrible out of the box. Some basic caching would be a huge improvement, something like the Quick Cache plugin. Feature NormalizationNot sure what else to call this, or what a good solution is, but one problem I run into frequently is plugins and themes duplicating the same functionality. For example, if you use WordPress SEO by Yoast it gives you control over things like the title tag, meta description, and adding various social metadata. Oops, you also use the OptimizePress theme which gives you control over the same parameters. Now it's a confusing mess of what's really controlling what, which box do you fill out, and so on. (Thankfully, OptimizePress lets me disable the SEO features. Not so with many other conflicts.) Improved Theming SystemThe WP theme hierarchy mostly works, but it also leads to really sloppy code and a disastrous mix of display logic and business logic. We don't need WP to operate entirely on the MVC principles or anything, but there is room for major improvements here. You can always attribute poor code to the theme authors, but WordPress can (and should) do a lot more than it does to enforce better coding practices. It starts with a better base system. If the theming system weren't broken, we wouldn't have need of all the many "theme frameworks" that exist. Besides leading to poor code, the template hierarchy doesn't take into account plugins. If you have a plugin with a custom post type for movies, the plugin has to override the template system or create a workaround to provide a default template for displaying the movies post type. Fix ShortcodesThis article by Tom McFarlin sums it up fairly well, and provides some ideas for a solution: http://tommcfarlin.com/wordpress-shortcodes/ How many times have you seen a blog article that has visible shortcodes? [spoiler][/spoiler] or [video]. They used to use a plugin or theme that provided these shortcodes but now they no longer use it and the blog is littered with annoying, visible shortcodes. How many times have you seen a shortcode like [headline]...[/headline] or even [h1]...[/h1]. Seriously, at this point just use HTML! Really this problem boils down to the limitations of the WYSIWYG editor, which forced the creating of shortcodes.

I work with wordpress a lot and my biggest issue with it is that there is no standard method of programming a theme. And the new themes they make are so confusing for beginners that you cannot figure out how to modify it. I can't even figure out how to modify them and I've been using it for years.. Well, I could probably figure it out if I spent a week studying it, but I cbf.. I just want a basic theme that I can start with and modify from there.

1. A Web FTP interface for when I am at a company that blocks that or a public wifi spot 2. Email integration with CPanel (and other dashboards) 3. Google/Bing/etc sitemap generation and submission (this can be done with plugnis but really it should be done by default now)

A more user friendly approach to "custom fields". Most users of WP don´t really know how to use them, but the power of custom fields is really what makes WP a complete CMS solution.

Can't think of much to "add" that isn't available through plugins.  That said, it's a travesty that canonical URLs (permalinks) aren't on by default, the register/login process isn't part of the themes, and security isn't much tighter.  Of course, I speak as an experienced business user and blog designer and not a developer; so I have no sense for why it is the way it is.

An interface to browse through the wordpress folders to be able to delete buggy plugin files. I have to use FTP clients to manually delete these files.