I've tinkered with SDR some and did a bit professionally. I always found GNU Radio to fall into the uncanny valley - too GUI to scratch my programming itch but too low-level to be useful for exploration. Between libraries like `pyrtlsdr` and desktop apps like `sdrangel`, I can't seem to find a niche for GNU Radio.

I worked with GNU Radio quite a bit at one point a decade+ ago, even writing a custom C++ block, but I almost exclusively used it via Python rather than the GUI toolkit. I found it much quicker to mess around with flow graphs in code than their various UI frameworks, spawning windows as needed when plotting waveforms / spectra etc. The GUI as you said was too cumbersome.

I understand that they were trying to make a pretty complicated topic more approachable, but I always felt the push to GUI was misguided. Maybe they would have had more luck embracing the “S” in “SDR” and making programming languages the primary development paradigm.