In my experience, if you are "stepping around more or less blindly" then the problem & EA have not been properly formulated. In general of course, if a gradient is available then gradient descent will do a better job >99% of the time.

Though with a bit of domain knowledge, and/or some careful design of the objective function(s), variation operators etc., an EA can be a pretty efficient explorer of the space. It's nichely-applicable, but when done properly it's far from blind.