Optimal route on creating landing pages So, time and again I've come across the requirement to create a "custom" or "landing" page which pretty much narrows down to this:

The co-existance of manageable text/content along with predefined views and/or blocks

For example:

-----------
|[managed |
|    text]|
|- - - - -|
|[View    |
|    pane]|
|- - - - -|
|[HTML    |
|   block]|
|_________|


Page Manager seems to be the way to go, but apart from using a block to accomodate my Managed Text (in this example), and thus creating a block for "non-blocky" purposes, and using it as an HTML containing entity, I cannot think of a better way.

So, tl;dr version:

Which is the optimal/Drupal way of having predifined and managed content bundled up together in a single page?
Yes, as you mentioned, you can do that reasonably easily with Panels / Page Manager

Enable the "Custom content panes" module to add arbitrary HTML content to Panels regions.

Note, when using Views in your Panels content try Views Content Pane type displays, which are designed for embedding into Panels and provide some useful settings in the View.