I see it as analogous to structuring source code text. The sweet spot IMO lies in the place where the editor offers guidance for common use-cases (think auto-indent, on-demand auto-format), but allows you to arrange code in a non-standard way when appropriate. That I think would be ideal.
Not all good programmers care about maintaining perfect visual order and I think that's fine. They would appreciate the automation and would be discouraged by the lack of it. Same as in text languages/IDEs.
Of course it's totally fine if your audience does not care about such features or they are not a priority.
But for a good general-purpose system I think that would be a must.
Now the sweet spot is not trivial to achieve and I haven't completely solved it, but I feel it can be done and I'd invest in researching it.
I fully agree that the visual environment should arrange the newly created graph nodes in a nice way automatically. In the Enso 2.0 version we have a very early support implemented exactly for that. However, there is a lot to be done yet to have it working fluently in the case of bigger and complex graphs. It is a fascinating research topic for me, TBH.
I see it as analogous to structuring source code text. The sweet spot IMO lies in the place where the editor offers guidance for common use-cases (think auto-indent, on-demand auto-format), but allows you to arrange code in a non-standard way when appropriate. That I think would be ideal.
Not all good programmers care about maintaining perfect visual order and I think that's fine. They would appreciate the automation and would be discouraged by the lack of it. Same as in text languages/IDEs.
Of course it's totally fine if your audience does not care about such features or they are not a priority.
But for a good general-purpose system I think that would be a must.
Now the sweet spot is not trivial to achieve and I haven't completely solved it, but I feel it can be done and I'd invest in researching it.
PS I hope your project succeeds!