One thing panels does well is to put a bunch of unrelated or at least not directly related content in different areas on your page. One thing it doesn’t do well, by itself, is to stripe content across regions.

But what we can do is get Views to do that kind of thing for us. And because Views is not plugin driven, instead of telling the user “Oh you have to theme it” we can provide a plugin that does exactly that. In fact, I’ve decided to try and do away with the “Oh you have to theme it” answer, and created a new project on Drupal, called the Views Bonus Pack where I (and some other people who do a lot of Views work) can put plugins and default views to give the starting user a place to work from as well as a bunch of cool tricks.