Ok I got that.
Let me ask you this.
In the Cutline theme, l_sidebar and r_sidebar default are coded to show what they want. But as soon as you add a widget to a sidebar, that supersedes those 2 php files. Correct? Assuming that is true, where can you go in and edit the code after you add the widget, take for example categories, if I wanted to only display certain cats, which I know how to do from the codex, about the loop, and also reading pearsonified.com, but then wanted another category widget added for another category.
To do this, is the only reason I can see why they let you add multiple instances of the category widget, unless I am missing something completely.