I'm in a rather odd demographic: I've got about a decade of experience as a developer (as a paid full-time dev working on some FOSS projects) but recently switched careers to design. The design and dev mindsets are definitely different. I obviously prefer tweaking things in code, but designing a layout is fundamentally a visual communication task, so working visually is preferable. I've just started working on a new portfolio site and was wondering if I could skip the Figma/whatever wireframe phase and just use a local WYSIWYG tool for a static page.
> there are many tools supporting static sites but not many for production web apps.
The funny thing is that the only true WYSIWYG tool I can find that isn't part of a paid SaaS ecosystem or complete inflexible garbage is Adobe Dreamweaver, which has been dying a slow death for decades. It has a few positive traits-- it makes responsive designs, works with bootstrap 4 and a few CSS libraries which make relatively clean code rather than spinning up the inscrutable spaghetti monsters it did in the aughts, and has a really solid built-in code editor (which I assume is Brackets on the back end) but there are bits of primary functionality that have just been broken for years and clearly not on the docket for an update. I looked at it for a few hours last week and decided it probably wasn't long for this world.
Of course you can't spit without hitting an SSG with hot reloading, and in-editor previews are de rigueur, but none of those offer a visual-first workflow for page design, which is what a professional designer really needs. You can have document-style WYSIWYG editing a la TinyMCE, which is fine for a blog post, but if you want to put together the structure of a page from the ground up, you're still context switching between an editor and a browser window which is an ineffective way for designers to work, even if they have the knowhow.
> While this is easy for a marketing page, it's much more difficult to do in a complex application context.
Sure, and this would have saved me some time in the various complex web apps I've made. But for the technically simpler use cases like my portfolio page, unless you're going to use Squarespace, Wix, Artstation, Webflow, etc etc etc and buy into their ecosystem, there really is no option for people that need reasonable control over the site's design without a code-first approach. Aside from Dreamweaver, I think the only one I could actually locate and install was part of Sea Monkey, and it seems to be an... uh... let's say under-loved part of an already under-loved suite of tools. And while my portfolio or a marketing landing page are technically simpler, the quality of the layout is often significantly more important than it is in a web app. Web apps usually convey factual information, figures, maybe provide tools for modifying things, etc. In a marketing page or a portfolio, what you're trying to communicate-- vibe, flow, visual movement, and other intangibles-- takes much more nuance.
(In fact, when developers see a software interface they think was 'ruined by a designer', it was usually ruined by a project manager or a developer trying to make something 'look designed' by mimicking some simple, elegant design they saw that was totally inappropriate for the application. Then they call someone like me. :-)