Hi Wolfgang,
Thanks for the tip: I’ll try to adapt what you suggest to the case of blocks and question-hint-answer, and then let you know if I succeed.
Out of curiosity, how can one access the counter associated to an enumeration or an item?
You can use \rawcountervalue[<name of the enumeration environment>] or \convertedcounter[<name of the environment>].
Also, if I understand correctly, the command
\increment\QuestionCounter
creates first a counter named QuestionCounter, if it does not exist yet, and then increments its value: so one does not need anymore commands such as
\newcounter\QuestionCounter
before incrementing it. Am I right?
No, you don’t need \newcounter because \increment checks if the counter exists because it tries to increase the value. The \newcounter command which creates the counter can also be used to reset the value and not only to create the counter.