Your description of getting bored midway through testing brought a good laugh :D Thanks for pushing through the boredom, testing, and making it your own. I was hoping this prompt might allow people to both go deep in a creation process to build the perfect sidebar and only quickly test if they were low on time.

When trying to figure out what to test next, I had a similar experience of needing at least an hour to create something I was relatively happy with. While it’s neat to have more options to explore and build, there’s definitely a level of refinement still needed as right now the customizations options are wide open. This is intentional and is part of what’s being worked on right now. I really like what you made for what it’s worth!

I passed along your feedback directly to some of the folks who worked on the TT1 theme. Thanks for your honesty there. I like to say “thanks for making me better” when I get feedback that’s hard to hear.

The preview problem is something I saw with the first round for testing and expect to see with this one too. I put your feedback in this related GitHub issue for future reference: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/28208#issuecomment-785450333

In today’s Core Editor chat, Riad touched on the width issue as something he wants to turn his attention to for FSE: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/02/24/editor-chat-summary-24-february-2021/ “For example, the wide/full flags we have for the post content editor are optimized for the post content and for backward compatibility but these notions don’t translate properly to a fully editable theme.” Ultimately, Gutenberg provides all the spacing so there’s little themes can do here right now. I regularly run into this with my own testing so appreciate this being touched on here. I just followed up with Riad to make sure there are open issues/PRs to capture this.

As for the “Add Block Icon” feedback, I’ve added it to this overall issue that highlights many of the pain points with the current setup and included a video of my own experience: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/26404#issuecomment-785461564

You mentioned that the settings didn’t stick when you’re using the Top Toolbar but I wasn’t able to replicate that when just using WordPress 5.6.2 without any additional plugins installed. I was able to turn that preference on, publish a post, navigate to wp-admin, and start a new post with the preference saved.

As I mentioned in my comment above, the Query block is meant more for theme authors than users and purposefully wasn’t a main focus of this testing call to prevent confusion. Most end users will interact with block variations (like Posts Lists in this test). Stay tuned for a dedicated call for testing though as I think it’s important to get a refined experience with that powerful block and the resulting variations, patterns, settings, etc.

Finally, to keep it brief, your feedback about the featured image block is so on point. I’ve included it in an issue about the block itself and various cropping options: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/27620#issuecomment-785461448

Thanks again for testing and for making FSE better. In the chaos of 2020/2021, I don’t take it for granted that people take time to explore and share their honest thoughts. As I said earlier, it’s the only way we’ll get better.