You can make patch panels work but you have to invest a lot of money into it. It is by no means a cost savings installation but one more appropriate for a very dynamic office where people move around constantly and one day a connection is a network link the next day it is a phone link and you have a phone switch where you cannot reprogram the extension number but have to cross it to another physical port.
I've done a few of them. You need enough patch panel space to bring in all your Cat 5 or 6 home runs. Then you need another set of patch panels just for whatever phone switch you are using. So you pull off the 110 or 66 block connections for the EXT lines on the switch into a patch panel and then you cross connect using patch cords as needed. I have done it with three racks, side by side. The center rack is for the home runs, the left rack for phone equipment and the right for network.
It worked out great but it was very expensive. We must have sold them 400 patch cords, a dozen 24 port patch panels plus extensive cable raceway, management and tray products. Definetely a deep pockets project.
But I'll agree the person tasked with swapping patch cables is usually so dumb that they never do get it right and they treat it as rocket science. So we still had to come in and fix things. All that money and they basically got very little for it.
Then you have to be diligent and make all your own line cords. If you use 6 po jacks in a 8 pos connector you're usually OK. 4 pos and you bend pins. You cannot count on the employees to care much about this and when they add a phone they just use the patch cord in the box rather than make a new one using 6 pos.
So it can become a real mes unless you are very diligent.
