There's currently several aspects of the inserter under consideration: categories (#19279, #11406), patterns (#20951), searches (#20196), tips (#17091), etc. In order to understand what updates we need to make to the inserter we should consider all of these together. The one that has a more drastic effect on it are patterns.

This is not an exhaustive list, but it highlights some of the current issues.

• The current inserter strikes a good balance on information density and not overpowering the page. Any updates should seek to retain this quality.
• Find an alignment on default categories and “open by default” for panels. The current state of categories is not scalable.
• Also account for collections (should likely be presented differently to categories) in the design updates.
• Reusable blocks are lost now that block categories overpower the presentation. Find a better way of presenting them.
• The current design proposals in Move the Block Patterns UI to the inserter #20951 pretty much obscure half the page. This is particularly problematic for the sibling inserter (we cannot open a huge module in the middle of the page). Do we need something simpler, an Alfred-like UI that lets you drill down as you need to?
• Take into account the quick inserter: should patterns be shown there? How would they be presented?
• The patterns shown in Move the Block Patterns UI to the inserter #20951 are also a bit too limiting and probably too small — how would it deal with taller patterns? At the moment, patterns won’t have an extra preview, so the default one should probably be large enough. As it stands, the preview of blocks themselves is larger.