In reply to Nick.

While shortcodes are fine for more expert users, they are hopeless for non technical users who can end up mangling them or unable to use them because they don’t understand the attributes.

Using Gutenberg I think you could write your own “block” that does whatever the shortcode was doing – and arrive at a more elegant solution most of the time.

Meta boxes are the issue and I’m sure it’s one they are going to address in time. This is a very early look, but we do need a way to add very visible fixed content areas so things like ACF, Yoast, etc. can be “in the face” of users and not tucked down the side in an expandable box.

It would also be nice if you could pre-configure a bunch of blocks and make them mandatory – maybe including them in a page template or something. There are numerous use cases where you want your author to have a choice of a few fixed formats (the layout and content areas for a homepage could be different to the about us page, etc).