> we should be able to do better than text files

https://gtoolkit.com/

?

Glamorous Toolkit is a lot more inline with what I'm thinking, being all about custom visualizations, but it's actually one level below where the tooling I want should be.

The issue with Moldable Development is that it adds a substantial additional cost in development time that is then hopefully paid back with much improved debugging and analytics.

That's a tough sell. The sort of tools you see in other engineering domains have tons of custom visualizations and such already built in, for all sorts of domains, even ultra niche ones (like battery design). That's why they can charge so much. Since all that stuff is just there ready to use, the cost is 0 (in effort, they cost a lot of money).

Because GT needs to adapt to all the insane sorts of existing use cases and programming languages, it can't possibly implement all visualizations itself (nor even know what those visualizations should be like).

What I'm thinking of is one level higher, where the entire development experience for a particular domain (which could be very broad) is entirely designed from the ground up with visualization in mind. Enso Analytics is a pretty good example.

GT could be used to build something like that, but is not itself that.