In reply to Cathy.

Hi Cathy,

I think the reason for giving users so much design control has to do with market demand. Other CMS competitors such as Wyx have gained ground with DYI users because they advertise supposedly easy visual site design. In WordPress, page builders like Elementor and Divi have completely taken over the theme market. So honestly WordPress has to give users more design control to stay competitive. And at least this way, we'll have less people using page builders that sabotage their sites and work against the WordPress software. It is worrying that the block system has users specifying design properties ad-hoc that are repeated in the database, but they are at least inching towards building in site-wide design properties. As Justin Tadlock has said elsewhere, Gutenberg really needs a design framework (https://wptavern.com/themes-of-the-future-a-design-framework-and-a-master-theme)

Most people get started with the Block Editor Handbook: https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/