Panels, Context and Display Suite have a fair amount of use case overlap. This will be an open discussion on what people are succeeding with. I don't plan to present anything, but wanted to frame a discussion. I use context but not panels or display suite. I can demo context some if appropriate to the discussion.
A recent article by Lullabot frames this discussion well:
http://www.lullabot.com/articles/assembling-pages-with-drupal
Display Suite:
Project: http://drupal.org/project/ds
Intro: http://mustardseedmedia.com/podcast/episode40
Context:
Project: http://drupal.org/project/context
Intro: http://mustardseedmedia.com/podcast/episode38
Panels:
Project: http://drupal.org/project/panels
Intro: http://mustardseedmedia.com/podcast/episode32