If Gutenberg gets rolled out without the ability to create multi-column layouts, I'm pretty confident in saying that this will cause a huge flood of complaints. And rightly so, in my opinion. As I intimated in my quote above, Gutenberg doesn't currently provide any benefit over the existing TinyMCE editor, and in some use cases, actually makes things more cumbersome.

I think it would be significantly better to delay rollout until multi-column support is added, rather than opting to add it in "Version 2". Let's provide a half-decent editing experience straight-out-of-the-gate, rather than forcing people to wait even longer for something they've been begging for, for years. There are literally tens-of-thousands of people using page builder type functionality and if Gutenberg doesn't provide, at the bare minimum, some sort of similar functionality such as multi-column support, then they're only going to drive more and more people towards third-party editors.