Maybe it has something with the schizophrenic trend toward .NET (for most of Autodesk, anyway).
In .NET, you can create Annotative blocks. There's an "Annotative" property on Block Records - just set it to true. I'm guessing it's also exposed in ObjectARX, although I haven't looked. VBA might be the odd man out. (Oh, and I don't know if you can do it in Lisp, either.)