> The block regions feature was touted as a much needed improvement,
> and after many years, finally made it into Drupal 4.7.  That said, I
> haven't seen that many people take advantage of it.  This can mean
> (at least) three things:

I use the 4.7 region feature extensively.

Before I converted my sites to 4.7, I used several methods to display
adsense blocks. These ranged from the flexiblock module, to calling
block_block('view', $delta) directly.

When I converted my sites to 4.7, I junked all that in favor of regions.

I even went further and had one "announcment" block at the top center
of the page, also using regions.

One problem I ran into, is that all blocks now inherit the styles of side
bar blocks, and I had to work around that with some quick hacks.

I agree with what Nedjo is saying, that normalization could help. I did
not run into that issue myself, because most of my sites are one
theme type of sites, however, I realize it can be a drag editing tons
of themes.