In reply to Richard.

For text content-oriented writers (such as in academia), it is much more important to enter long blog posts than how the posts appear or are formatted. Having to deal with and separate formatting and tool bars for each block is extremely cumbersome. The Unified tool bar helps, but is not as efficient to use as Tiny MCE. Such writers really need a Word proccessor-like composing experience more-so than a page builder experience.

Inline capabilities are vital, such as for inline LaTeX content. Short codes currently support inline text quite well, but the block approach does not work well for inline content types.

I think a compromise solution will be to have a third party continue to support the Classic Editor plug-in and short codes after 2020. Ideally it would be possible but optional to insert blocks for other content types in the text “scroll”.