I'll have to check out Heaps. But you're totally right that the "Unity way" of using the editor isn't how a lot of us would naturally gravitate to creating a game. I learned to like it, though (I think).

For me, I realized that wanting to "keep it all in code" is a learned habit, and part of why I learned it is because the tooling when everything in code is just so much better. I can navigate references, etc., count on compiler errors runtime errors, etc. But none of this fundamentally required me to keep it all in code _if_ the tooling allows it. With ~2020 it feels like the tooling is getting to that point.