I agree that for people whose idea of “site building” is slapping prefab shortcodes and widgets into stacks, or, worse, trying to wrangle ACF repeater fields, that Gutenberg is probably a dream come true!

It’s still silly prefab widgets with a hack for widgets that hold other widgets. And don’t get me wrong, Gutenberg blocks are VERY nice widgets.

But it’s still exhausting for those of us who work with professional designers that have to follow branding and company-wide style guides.

It’ll sure be nice when someone designs a block pattern or block template that lets us actually do our own layouts instead of finding and depending on someone else’s pattern that does what we want. Without us having to fire up a full SASS/SCSS stack to fiddle it ourselves.

Currently even the worst, most bloated shortcode-based page builders do that. And modern ones let us do it effortlessly.

I really don’t like depending on builders for layout and design. I’d infinitely prefer to have one single block wrangler that will let me do it.

I get that the core developers don’t understand why anyone would want to do this. They still think in terms of stacking fancy widgets and thats fine. Yay better widgets! But it’s like wondering why anyone would want PhotoShop or a camera when there’s already so many clip art and stock photo vendors.

I really am waiting eagerly to switch to blocks. But I need to be able to handle decisive layout if I want to continue working with my established clients and their designers.