Hey Mark,

Did you catch much of the summit in the end? And if so did anything adjust your viewpoint or did it reenforce how you feel?

There will be plenty of people with a valid counter argument to everything you said as their context of how, when and for what purpose they are creating websites is different.
And there will be many people fully supporting what you said. And those sort of on the middle like me having tried both approaches over the years. Although, when I say both approaches I'm talking about pre page builder creating our own page builder with acf flexible content field and repeater - which is pretty similar to blocks now.

I've found compromises in both approaches. Those compromises are obvious so we don't even need to go into them... Just imagine picking 10 people randomly that have created a website, and ask them to try it the opposite way to how they did it and those objections and barriers would be pretty clear... Whether it's time, budget, skills or project needs.

Personally I'm a big Beaver Builder fan, I used to handcode sites before this - like not even a child theme type approach. At this point in time if one wants to be coding to only manipulate the framework you are working with as opposed to coding to create it, then there isn't an alternative fully to what the likes of Beaver themer and beaver builder type tools offer in a fair fight starting empty handed. By that I mean, starting empty handed means that a developer with a starter theme tweaked with 2 years of improvements and a personal creates block library is a big head start on the person installing a page builder in 2 mins.

For me personally I'm excited though about Generateblocks and GeneratePress 3.0 introducing loop controlling functionality.

Honestly, what interests me now is will the block editor be able to catch up in 12 months to the things page builders do really great. UI, consistent workflow, front end editing that models the actual design etc... And in that 12 months will all page builder products just sit on their hands waiting to be made obselete? I think the answer to that imo is no on both questions which in my book means they are as relevant as ever, but there is just a new and awesome new way to start building and developing sites with WordPress now with blocks.
I can even see Genesis making a big comeback for those people that decide to switch from page builder + page builder friendly themes to the block editor way.

Either way, it's really exciting times. I hope you maybe caught Robby's talk as that was surprisingly not what I thought he might be saying, it was a really great step back and mindful look at how the role of a website has changed.

About Astra, yeah that really was a mess. But, the same company has a popular blocks pack so it could easily have been blocks users finding themselves part of a human sales funnel. I think what they did doesn't represent the majority of trusted themes and plugin vendors, and it was a mistake on their part hence made such good TV watching the reaction lol. But you are right in that if you put your eggs in a vendor's basket then it's a risk. We're all in Matt Mulenweg basket of course together. But less moving parts is no doubt less risk.

Sorry, that was a blog post but I loved your comment and it really made me think things through this Sunday afternoon ☺

I think the approach you are talking about is no doubt the most personally satisfying and probably most professionally artisan way to build sites with WordPress, but it's not without its barriers to entry.

Thanks.
Paul