I'm curious if you've tried Simulink? Because my experience with visual programming tools maps largely to yours. Especially the RAD tools of the late-90's and early-00's. Eventually you get to a place where the "simple" thing is a dizzying array of radio buttons and check boxes to manage that are all hidden away in their own little silos that you can only get to by drilling down through the visual hierarchy.

This becomes a huge problem with your "pivot" for changing things is plumbing up and down, up and down, up and down the hierarchy. Instead of being able to flip the whole thing on its head and seeing all the settings/flags/options for whole classes & categories of similar things and changing them from that perspective.

It's like there's a transition point where you know enough about how things are all put together that being forced to interact with multiple things at once only through the top of their individual silos starts to fall apart pretty dramatically.

The reason I ask about Simulink, is that it's very common in the toolchain of our customers (I'm CEO of https://www.auxon.io) and we're building an integration to it for our product. For the most part it seems to do a much better job of being an IDE for more complicated models/programs compared to the bevy of RAD tools I've used in the past. I have certainly encountered limitations reminiscent of those old RAD ways, but I can also see how much better a job it seems to do before you hit those snags.