I'm in North Carolina, so it's the
South, but not the DEEP South. :-)
But that's cool, I can wait until Spring.

As for why I hired this contractor... I sent it out for bids and had
several replies, but most of the contractors that responded seemed
pretty incompetent. 3 of them gave me a quote without ever seeing the
project! This one asked all the right questions, and came across as
more competent than the others when we got an estimate... until the
actual work started.

We're only a few days into the construction, but I've found several
problems that I've had to make him go back and correct (like, putting
the 4x4 supports on cinderblocks, instead of cementing them into the
ground). And he keeps arguing that I've changed the plans, when in
fact he's either forgotten the plan, misunderstood the plan (in spite
of a drawn rendering, drawn to scale), or he is simply hoping that I
will have forgotten so that he can get away with crap work (which is
what I suspect). Today, he was supposed to have been working from 8am
until 5pm, but the crew ended up getting here at 10am and knocked off
sometime between 1pm and 2:30pm, leaving the framing half finished
when the schedule called for the framing to be completely finished
today.

These are issues that I wouldn't have known until construction began,
and now my options are to either continue with him, or to hire someone
else to finish the job with the hopes that they're available
immediately.

You have to realize that I'm in a pretty rural area, so I don't
exactly have a lot of professional contractor options to choose from.
Most of them are just unemployed people that will swear that they can
build a deck, even though they've never actually built one before.

Welcome to North Carolina. I just moved
into a house in western NC.
Actually, it took about 1 year from the
initial permit to the certificate of
occupancy. The 10 to 2:30 thing was
normal on many, many days. Once
I sold my old house and was living in a
motor home, I told my builder that
before I didn't care about speed, but
now I was pushing. I lived in the motor
home for 5 months. I complained to the
contractor that there were periods
of 5 or 6 days where not one worker
stepped foot in my house. After
that, there was always someone around,
even if it were only a few hours.
As for the footings, here there is
basically no frost line here. In my old
area up north, the frost line was 40".
In this house some of my footings
and foundations are way overkill because
my builder likes to build in
lots of safety margins. But I paid for
that margin. My footings on the
attached deck are only about a foot
deep, but they are concrete. But,
there are whole houses built on concrete
blocks in this area. Of course,
if your contract, either verbally or
written, said concrete and not block,
that's different. I, too, would prefer
concrete. BTW, here they just dug
a hole and mixed some concrete, poured
it in the hole and later attached
the deck post to it with metal fittings.