Spamming with Blocks (and other annoyances)

Dear WordPress developers,

it’s safe to state I’m a patient guy. I even tried my best to cool the tempers of some other bloggers who were furious or anxious back in May, with Gutenberg approaching, telling them that the new editor works just as well, only differently. But seriously, it feels like you keep making things worse day by day:

Since the old days, in another century, I’m happy editing HTML code, and I actually prepared a few templates for longer articles. But for my simple photo blog one would think it’s the easiest task in Gutenberg to place a picture and add a line of text in the visual editor. Alas, it’s not, and it keeps getting even more difficult with each new iteration of your software:

What is the point of overloading the block menu with an ever-growing list of Eventbrite checkouts and business hours blocks, forcing anyone looking for a plain image block to scroll past literally dozens of nonsense entries, time and again? Granted, there’s an option called Block Manager where I can disable all that stuff, but that only works for the current article, or at best for the current browser session, depending on whatever. After starting up next time anyway, I’ll find myself confronted with an even longer list of spam blocks again, ironically placed in a section called most-used (as if).

And where is an options menu, comparable to the classic admin settings panel, allowing me to specify certain presets for media? I would like, for example, my images to always be linked to their media file and placed full-size – after all, that’s a photo blog. Why do I have to specify this for every single picture, or use the pesky workaround of copy/pasting in the code editor and then replacing the image files?

Or, the most simple task of them all, one would think: Switching a whole batch of articles (or at least a single, multi-paragraph article) from left-align to fully justified, e.g. after changing a theme? No way. It’s by the paragraph, or by lots of typing in the code editor.

These and similar tiny nuisances combined make using your shiny new editor a really unpleasant experience, and I’m saying this as a paying customer, not just as a grumpy user of your free services. I know, from many years around here, that your support definitely is among the better out there; and I sincerely hope you keep listening to the lots of customers who are less-than-happy with some developments lately.

Thanks.