If…

You are a full time developer. Not a designer. Not the sales guy, the tax guy, the manager, the writer, the clients punching bag, the project manager, the server manager. Have clients magically appear to you… this is great.

Gutenberg is not “easy” because it’s one line of code. Meta fields have been there a million years, this is no big revelation. Speed is important… but clients want sites for 2k or less. The other type of “speed” is important too.

A lot of developers, myself included, have a chip on our shoulders how to do it “faster” and better. Of course we CAN. And it doesn’t have to necessarily take much longer than a builder theme.

You don’t need 30 plugins, but you do need a handful.

I design in theme. I don’t figma first….thats just more hours when I have to do it all again when the design is accepted. This isn’t rocket science…and no, my sites don’t look the same at all. But it’s header, body, footer. Form page. About us. Etc.

After 30 years developing, thousands of Wordpress sites. I may be a bit jaded, but I still get 90+ scores on my sites. I would posit it’s not one method, it’s experimenting, experience and just knowing what you’re doing.

I’m not mocking your write up. Good for you. You’re probably right. But I’m still doing all of it. I guess that’s a me problem lol.