[jganetsk]

I disagree.

- There is plenty of talk of block cipher modes. What do you mean "nobody talks about" them?

- Block cipher modes are critically important but a lot of them are fairly straightforward and standard.

- Understanding how to design a pseudorandom permutation is where most of the ingenuity of cryptography is.

- If you are doing cryptanalysis, you definitely want to know about SubBytes and ShiftRows, etc.