People who want to use TeX to write a document but copy code from examples, old list messages etc. but don't why they have to do it something like this.
OK, it's hard to write a fancy layout without defining your own header styles etc. without a definition but use then as many high level contructs (\framed, \define, ...) as possible and try to avoid things like \vbox or \expandafter.
This is my point of view : "use TeX to write a document" = "write a program in TeX programming language" TeX programming language is not like lua, python, c++ , java and so on; TeX programming language is like m4, ie a macro language. If you write a simple document (= a simple program) context high-level const.s will almost completly hide the programming aspect ; but it's impossible that context "high-level" cover *all* program; so sooner or later one will use lua(tex) expression (which can be a "natural" choice for most of programmer but can be slow) , or ContTeXt macro (which can be less slow but not so natural ) , or even TeX macro - primitive .
http://texblog.net/latex-archive/plaintex/expandafter/ hey, this is not a "moderate use of expandafter" as I intended .. I dropped latex for similar examples . In this situation "please, grep setvalue base/*"
-- luigi