Nice new design, but it’s mind boggling that such a simple clean page design couldn’t efficiently be built using blocks after 5 years of Gutenberg development.

It remains today fundamentally difficult to impossible to take a traditionally mocked up page design and execute that design using blocks. This is a problem.

Sure, blocks are fine to “design a page in the browser” and accept what you get out of blocks, but blocks continue to lack the flexibility and controls needed to produce a responsive, accessible, pixel perfect layout based on a mock-up.

What used to take a day and a dozen lines of php and a dozen lines of css, now takes weeks of building custom blocks because the core blocks can’t easily be tweaked via hooks and lack the basic controls necessary.

Blocks needed a standardized format like widgets had, with a standardized set of controls native to all blocks (responsive settings, color settings, font settings, borders, spacing, etc). Instead we’re still in yolo mode where everyone does blocks their own way and the UX between blocks is absolute chaos. Very little looks intentionally planned out from the ground up to be effective.

How did we get here? And how do we fix it?