I am personally not a huge fan because my brain is not wired to do visual programming.

I have Node-RED installed and running alongside HomeAssistant, but I never use it because automations that are easy to do in NR are just as simple to create directly in HA. Automations that are complex enough to need NR are easier (for me) to code and debug in Python.

I think NR is great for non-programmers and maybe for quick prototyping, so I am not disparaging it in any way. The functionality and implementation is excellent; it's just not for everyone.

(Node-RED project lead here) So would we! The only way we improve is by listening to the community and taking on the feedback we get.

I didn't dislike node red, but it didn't really fit my use case well. I wanted to use it as a REST service to write APIs for clients to use to generate reports from our various databases. Basically a low-code data pipeline from cassandra, mongo, sql, etc. It worked...but things like switching git branches while keeping things running, updating the service, aggregating results, etc, were difficult. More difficult than just writing the code.

I wrote one then never used it again opting for node instances inside of our Kubernetes cluster instead.