Replace!! Here is an example Rule I wrote:
$InternalWaitingLinks = count(links.outbound.waitingFor.Name);
if ($StatusCompleted == never & (!StatusTags(waitingFor) & !StatusTags(Someday)) & ($InternalSequentialState(parent) == 0 | $SiblingOrder <= $InternalSequentialState(parent)) & ($SiblingOrder == 1 | $StatusCompleted(prevSibling) != never)) {
$InternalNextAction = true;
$InternalUrgency = 1;
} else {
$InternalNextAction = false;
};
if ($ChildCount > 0) {
$StatusProgress = (count(collect_if(child, $StatusCompleted!=never, $Name)) / $ChildCount) * 10;
};
That is just one piece of about a dozen which give this Tinderbox file an OmniFocus style opt-in sequential action processing which is capable of leaping over stragglers and intelligently allocating itself into queues based on overall workload.
I agree with your general statement; though I’m not sure if I agree with your implementation of it. It sounds like you would have Tinderbox essentially eschew all of the things that make it the only program on any platform that does what it does—merely so it could fit in better with its neighbours. You want the guy inventing a cure for HIV in his basement to spend more time trimming the hedges—basically. I’d rather have him in the basement no matter how out of fit his lawn looks. 
Trying to express the above, which isn’t even that complex in the grand scheme, with graphics would be a nightmare. Truly. 200 built-in attributes (with opportunity for many more of your own) and 100 syntax operators many of which have infinite optional values that can be passed to them? There is a reason software isn’t written with a bunch of icons and squiggly lines, but with code. Code is a language for expression of abstract logical transformations on information/language. The best analogy I can think of would be to compare written word with pictograms. The pictograms might be easier to learn than the many complex and sometimes strange rules of grammar, but you can’t easily express nuanced ideas with little colourful graphics. For “dumb” stuff like, “Whoa, you are going the wrong way down this road, sir!”, a pictogram is fantastic; make it red and bright. For describing how to reset an obscure counter in a 23rd level child, and synchronise it with a master node that is collecting regression data from 1,000s of child items which are passively gathering data from from a few hundred server’s status dumps over the Internet—eh… not so much!
I’m not going to say “ordinary users be damned”, but it is a little like someone saying Maya should tone down the complexity because the modern crop of 3D For Everyone applications are making it so anyone can create a spinning text graphic and it takes so many steps to do the same thing in Maya and you have to do them all right, or bad things will happen. DEVONthink, VoodooPad and these types of programs can get away with a graphical query system because they have a tiny fraction of Tinderbox’s breadth in this arena. They have, at most, about a half-dozen “operators”; things like “Contains” and “Starts with”. They have nothing at all like [b]$x |= substr($data,n,x) + eval("secMaster", $runCode)[/b]. Or they do, to a degree, but where they do, they use AppleScript, Lua, or Python. Syntax.
But all of that aside: I do agree that it could use a more efficient (I’m not going to say friendlier, I don’t think all software needs to be friendly) intake system. Twig is good for that; I’m just not sure if it is $80 good. I frankly don’t mind adding notes right into a map. I can see ways to improve the efficiency of that, but it’s not killing me the way it is.
I definitely recommend downloading Mark Anderson’s aTbRef. It is kept very up to date, and is an exhaustive reference of everything Tb can do, written in Tinderbox. You can view the HTML version of it which he exports from the Tb file, here.
Tb’s help to a step back when they switched from PDF to Apple Help, in my opinion. But I really, really despise Apple’s help browser! It’s a horrible interface for a complex program. I guess it’s fine for something like iTunes, but yeah. Much prefer PDF for anything that requires a decent amount of study.
Tinderbox is certainly - from what I’ve seen so far - an application for interacting with notes and thoughts. And it is most certainly also a powerful structuring tool. The thing is that a tool like Tinderbox becomes more and more relevant the more data you are dealing with.
