Revisiting Drupal's Block System

For some time now I've had a sneaking suspicion that the reason so many developers prefer Context over Drupal's block system boils down to developers taking power away from the client's admin. There may be clumsy aspects to blocks, but client's can understand them. This is well illustrated in this excellent post by Randall Knutson.

Context was the most awesome thing since sliced bread. You could specify conditions and reactions for just about anything. Granular control without programming. We were in heaven. Then we delivered the site to the client. Same old problems started occurring only possibly worse. How do I place a block on a page? Uh, go to contexts and add a context. See, you want to set up your conditions for when it is visible and then add a reaction for blocks... Oh nevermind, I'll do it.

You can read more in How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Block.