Lots of good ideas come back around every few years. That usually means they are in fact good ideas, but simply that the rest of the industry hasn't caught up yet -- either the hardware isn't fast enough, or operating systems can't support it, or the tooling and infrastructure isn't there yet.

For example, GC was conceived in the 1950's, and through at least the late 1990's it hadn't taken off "in a more mainstream way", and people were saying "this idea comes back around every few years" as evidence that it never would. It turns out that GC is actually a pretty good idea, but the average computer prior to 2000 or so wasn't so good at it, either in hardware or software. That didn't make it a bad idea. It was a good idea that we weren't yet great at implementing.

What I'm hearing about visual programming today sounds very similar. Everyone has a list of complaints, but they're very specific, and very fixable. No good editors -- agreed! The solution, then, is to write a good editor, not to throw out all of visual programming. (Remember what the machine language programmers said about compilers, back before we had decent text editors?) No good diff tools -- agreed! But once upon a time, text didn't have good diff tools, either, so we wrote them. And so on.

If you start with the premise that visual programming is bad, then you will see a list of 10 problems as evidence that it's insurmountable. If you start with the premise that visual programming is good, then a list of 10 problems is your TODO list for the next year.