Designing abstraction layers is hard. If the abstractions are too high level, then it ends up being limiting (kind of like an over-trained neural net that can only parrot the training dataset) -- "I used Generator for 20 years but found it hard to get past a certain point in making my ideas come to life." If the abstractions are too low level, you gain flexibility but spend a lot of time rebuilding basic stuff ("builds character" as they used to say but impairs usability).
I've used Pure Data, Max and VCV Rack in the classroom, and don't really love any of them.
I use SuperCollider for my music. I'm not sure why but that hits a sweet spot for me... it "thinks" the way I do...? I see complaints that the architecture is confusing but tbh it made sense to me pretty much right away. You can 'do' loop large banks of signal chains even more easily than Max's mc. wrappers, and the way that graph optimization is atomized into smaller definitions (instead of globally like Pd) supports glitch-free incremental building up of a texture. And, having a full suite of data structures (esp. hash tables!) plus proper local function scope makes it feasible to implement more rich compositional algorithms with less fuss than in Pd or Max (yeah, I'd rather not implement my own call stack mechanism just to do real recursion, no thanks).
But when I tried to use SC in the classroom with mainland Chinese electronic music students, it was too many English keywords and they gave up. Using Pd in class at least gets 20% engagement, vs 0%. I think there's some value, for them, in replacing some text keywords with a graphical layout. But... Pd and Max suggest that you have access to the power of programming, without programming, while in reality, both environments are as fiddly and nitpicky as any programming language.
VCV is brilliant but there's some fundamental way that I don't get it... I want to use it like SC or Pd
but it expresses logic differently.
LLMs are moving toward the point of stating a functional spec and getting code. When that finally really works, it would be a game changer.
hjh