In reply to Miles Gilmour.
Hi Miles,

I would totally agree with you if this was 6-7 years ago. Now when somebody writes a shortcode also makes a custom MCE button to generate the code, some with the default parameters, or the more sophisticated ones, would open a dialog box, have you fill the parameters, visually choose color, image, etc… My problem are not the shortcodes, those are working for now, it’s the lack of the custom MCE buttons. Also, do the blocks support php, or html only? Some shortcodes need php as they check for logged in/out users for example. Besides, adding 30-40 custom blocks (from the shortcode conversions) to the existing ones, do you thing the end users are not going to be totally confused and overwhelmed?

I hope you are correct about the Meta Boxes that they will address them. But until these 2 things are done, Gutenberg will be a total disaster, and will always stay useless, thanks to the dozens of page builders, if somebody wants something more than a simple editor, or shortcodes. We spent hundreds of hours if not thousands, in following their coding standards and developed those things through the years, and just like that, we are being told, to scrap everything and start from fresh and now code block, without weighing the real advantages vs disadvantages of this monster. Let’s not forget, these are the people who gave us distraction free writing, something that the vast majority do not care or use, and yet, here we are in the verge of pushing things on us that we don’t want, with the potential of breaking thousands of themes and plugins. Don’t believe the hype of this thing, it will probably be the most hated thing in WordPress.

At the very least, they should give us an out to return back to the TinyMCE, at least that way, EVERYBODY would be happy.