In reply to Kevin Trye.

I just look at Astra and felt my shoulders slump and lungs sighing. While the art changes (images, colors, typography, header spacing, etc), what I immediately see, beyond the "pretty," is the same basic skeletal structure. Design uniqueness, unusualness, imagination, cleverness, suprise is being pushed to the bottom of the priorities stack whenever I find myself encountering this race toward more no-coding-needed site builders.

Decades ago, I founded and ran a successful small PR agency. We bucked the thinking that big companies only contracted with metro market agencies by getting to the top of our game. That meant learning how surprise in design can cause viewers to feel excitement, smile, remember, talk about a product or service that is otherwise, well, ordinary. It's not easy to accomplish. It's not fast. And it wasn't cheap.

But the pay-off in sales interest and long-lasting chatter was so extraordinary that our work was valued sufficiently to attract the attention of decision-makers at large companies. We preferred, curiously enough, to work with small business owners and mapped a way for them to financen what they resisted as too expensive. It was, of course, only expensive up-front. The consistent behavior after launch made it quite affordable and profitable.

And, it was fun!!!

Page builders are providing the convenience of fast site building that people believe they want.

For me, the operative phrase there is "believe they want."

We've become so focused on doing and getting 'er done, that it seems most people have lost an interest in understanding how design surprise and imagination can attract visitors to sites, where they then stay for more great content that quenches their hunger.

I have watched over the years as the same behavior has affected the logo development field and graphic design collateral pieces. I never dreamed that writing would experience the same. It has.

It feels to me like we have become passionate about working long hours to create masses of mediocrity.

I don't want to use or write JS React driven blocks. I don't want to use Page Builders. I don't want to use WIX or SquareSpace. I greatly enjoy the difficulty of design surprise and coding themes from scratch, starting with Underscores.

It's like exercise that one pushes one's self to do with struggle and pain but the fortitude of sticking with it gets me to a place where the results are, well, orgasmic. LOL. Seriously, though. The high from creation is fantastic.

Wal Mart shopping -- the place that delivers mediocrity -- is not.

Where do I go now? That is what is on my mind. I could do my thing inside WP. That door is closing and I feel it on my tail. I used to work a lot inside Drupal, before WP. I started my code days in vanilla editors. Drupal is cool in many ways; it's also a royal PIA. So I sit here, wondering.

But, more importantly than me, I also wonder if anyone out there in the web universe is also pausing to consider the world we are creating when the goal is speed, low-cost, easy, low-skill? There are unintended consequences to every decision; this I've seen over my lifetime repeatedly. We often do not look around the corner. Is anyone doing that?