Do you make them because you enjoy using them as trade goods, or because it's a way of getting rid of the stone that you'd otherwise be atom-smashing?
Mechanisms (and other things that need to be made from raw stone) are an interesting case. If you're making enough of them for the 1/4 drop rate to be an issue, then the labour and infrastructure you already had available for your mechanism-using megaproject can be briefly diverted into pump part production in order to set up an obsidian farm.
I use crafts to level up my masons and as my primary trade goods. I tend to load caravans down with as much as they can possibly carry, both to make them happier (and thus bring me more stuff next time) and to inflate my fortress wealth to bring in more fun.
For mechanisms, grates, floodgates, statues, and other such things... well, I like to build excessive amounts of traps, bridges and waterways.
I don't think catapults can use blocks as ammo either. I know siege weapons are not very effective, but hopefully that will change in the future. Not sure about stone-fall traps.
Obsidian farming is what I will probably end up doing.
Stone fall traps are moderately more effective with boulders being larger and/or denser now.
I definitely want to be able to produce more furniture from boulders, though. If you had a high-quality (not badly fractured) chunk of stone, about a cubic meter, which I think is roughly the volume in-game, you could produce a couple good-sized coffers from it just by splitting it in half, shearing a slab off the top, hollowing out the remainder and using the slab you sheared off as a lid, then move on to use the scraps from the process of hollowing out the interior to produce smaller items like mugs. It could be more efficient actually to cut it into 5cm thick slabs and use them to construct tables, cabinets, coffers, chairs or other objects that need large surface area but can afford to be fairly thin. Blocks would basically be premade slabs, so letting dwarves use them to construct the items slightly more rapidly could work if you've somehow made too many blocks and are short on boulders.
I've gotten used to the changes to a degree, but I'd still like some way to control the volume of material that is lost in mining.