Neither of those two things matter very much for file encryption. The short block size, for instance, is a very big deal with online encryption, but not a dealbreaker for offline encryption.
Neither gpg2 nor gpg1's defaults make short passwords safe; really, though, with a single targeted password, your passphrase needs to be extreme no matter what settings you use.
I'm not sure why an 8 byte block would materially impact file encryption. The kinds of attacks where short blocks come in handy are all online, CCA-style attacks. You might worry about things like CTR counter block sizes, but, again, not an issue for GPG1's defaults.
I'm not saying they're good settings. And: in particular, if you used them to encrypt something like session cookies, you could have serious vulnerabilities. But like I said: it's easy to encrypt files, and some things that are survivable for files aren't for other applications.
Which scenarios do you assume to be valid for offline encryption which don't make short block sizes problematic?
Why is poor password handling not a problem under these scenarios?