In reply to richard Ginn.

"We know themes in general are going to be obsolete in the near future."

hey, would you care to elaborate a little on this?

My take is that the main question is what kind of page/site is being developed and what kind of complexity with respect to design and data-display is taking place at which part of development using which technologies.

For a mainly data-driven site, let's say an event calendar, the additional features of Gutenberg over tiny_mce are mostly useless in my opinion, as the important content of the page is ideally saved in reusable post-type data-blocks and displayed according to list templates/search-logic. Adding page templating to Gutenberg merely changes the way the site's frame is developed or how a loop is integrated in a page.

(sidenote: I think there are still a couple of conceptual aspects unresolved with respect to now having two basic units for holding data in wordpress (and how they're saved): pages/posts (data in various types, metadata) and now blocks (data serialized in one field).)

For many corporate pages, added flexibility in terms of design is something to be avoided not to be offered to editors/authors. Here, again, there's no added benefit derived from a complex templating engine available on every page, quite the opposite: removing blocks and limiting styling options will become the more important aspect of customizing gutenberg.

That said, for a single, landing-page-style page, the added flexibility does make sense, because something like that takes tooo long and is too complex for classic template/coding to be economically viable.

So, basically, I think it's the underlying requirements of a page that will determine the most efficient way of developing and displaying data. Page builders/future Gutenberg are nice for front- and landing-pages, but usually much less important for second-level content pages, corporate pages with required design, that strive for editing simplicity, and data driven pages.

Changing the way the templating is done doesn't obliviate the need for it, it does, however, introduce a phase of uncertainty for certain clients who could be insecure if they should hire someone for expertise or go it alone, since, now, the technology allows them to (like page builders in general).

Thanks!