Rims always handle layout. Our slot duties often fall through the cracks. To other papers. We get along and work as a team in order to make deadline. Our weakness is that there often aren't enough of us on a shift.
Extra pages are okay.
The technological advances of the past 10 years have allowed for greater control of content presentation. What we have now are executive editors that have no conception of what it takes to do production work because they never dealt with pagination. There is a chasm that exists between the executive editors' theory and the copy desks' reality.