Trouble incorporating "Related Articles" block into panel
The problem is that, your view accepts a Term ID which it uses to get other nodes tagged with the same term. But when you are placing the views block (accepting TID asparameter) in Panels, how are you passing the context to it?

This is probably why your dev went in for the code based approach. I think you can create a custom PHP panels content, grab the node from the present path, then grab the tid from term reference field, and the pass in the tid as context while calling the view through views_embed_view() function.

If you want you can paste the code your dev used and I can help you how you can re use the code in panels to get the same result.

Code Should be something like this:

$node = menu_get_object();
if (is_object($node)) {
  $tid = $node-&gt;field_yourfieldname['und'][0]['value'];
  $output = views_embed_view('your view name', 'display name', $tid);
}
echo $output;


Put the above code in the panel, using a custom content with PHP.