Ahh that is certainly a very interesting idea to explore! Indeed, programming on the nets directly would not need messing with the fairly complex details of beta-optimality, leaving it as something to be dealt with, if required, by the programmer directly. As a language in its own right rather than as a computational device, interaction nets becomes a kind of Prolog-like language, where one similarly directly defines atoms and uses them as if they were data types.

By the way, I'm fairly certain that the Interaction Nets is the more general term, encompassing Interaction Combinators as merely some set of nets that happens to be a universal model of computation. They definitely both share the distinctions of principal ports v.s. auxiliary ports.