This is very interesting! While I do like machine embroidery on quilts it's the individual blocks I take issue with. I do love hand embroidered redwork though.
Last year I went on a bus trip to the Houston International Quilt Show. As part of the fun we could create as many as 5 individual quilt blocks to put into a drawing held during the Sunday morning breakfast. The blocks needed to be flowers and bees and you could piece or embroider them. I painstakingly created three pieced flower blocks to contribute and I won 8 blocks at the breakfast. When I opened the roll of blocks, all were embroidered. While they were pretty, I had no idea what I was going to do with them because I really didn't see them as quilt blocks. It took a year but I finally cut them down and made them into lavender sachets thanks to a suggestion by my sister-in-law. To me they just didn't fit my admittedly narrow view of a quilt block.