Drag and Drop Page Design Plugins – The best is….?

Prior to WP 3.0 it seemed like every theme shop had their own approach to menus and custom post types and touted them as features better than all the rest. While there are things about the core implementation of each that came with 3.0 to be improved, it certainly passed the 80% feature threshold and has strong hooks / filters / actions for the 20% of userbase who want / need to extend it for functionality.

Lately, I’ve been noticing the litany of column shortcodes and drag & drop page designers as feeling like a similar set of features might be time to “grow up into core features” to raise all boats. Here’s just a few of the theme framework editors that have caught my eye in recent searches:

• Presswork – https://presswork.me/
• Pagelines – https://www.pagelines.com/
• Carrington Build – https://crowdfavorite.com/wordpress/carrington-build/
• Headway – https://headwaythemes.com/

I haven’t used any as yet, but having watched their videos can see a few pros / cons of each and a lot of overlap in functionality. I’m also sure there are plenty more out there as that level of page / content layout design capability is an important aspect when it comes to viewing WordPress as a CMS.

So a couple of open-ended questions I guess:

1. Who’s used more than one of the above and how did you find they compare?
2. Do you think such functionality might be worth core consideration for a release on the far horizon? 4.0 perhaps?
3. Any memories / lessons learned of the process of bringing menus and CPTs into 3.0 you would like to share?
4. How would you answer the title question of this post: Drag and Drop Page Design Plugins – The best is….?