As with most other threads, I think we've gotten mixed up into multiple arguments. The first is we have some
people who say the schematic in XSI is useless, and those who disagree and are defending it's uses. It may be useless for some people, but for those who do use it such as myself, it is absolutely critical for production, every hour of every day.
The second argument is about ways to improve the schematic, and the proposed ideas come from user experience with other applications, including si3d, Maya, Houdini. Those who don't use the schematic at all or feel it is "useless" seem to be more likely to want to replace the schematic wholesale with something that looks like Houdini's node graph, or the Hypergraph. I'd rather Softimage worked on their own improvements based on XSI's non-linear workflow which would hopefully consider the modes in the operator stack, among other things.
As far as improvements go, it also seems there are two areas, aesthetic improvements such as node size and layout, and functionality improvements such as the ability to rewire operator connections. Aesthetic changes don't require updates to XSI's core the way many functionality improvements do, which is why we've seen a few changes in aesthetics of the schematic in the past few XSI updates. We haven't seen any major udates to functionality such as the ability to rewire operators, not because Soft doesn't want to, but because what we already have in the schematic is likely a manifestation of XSI's current core architecture.
We should all know by now from what we've seen at siggraph and other user groups that Softimage is already working on core upgrades for next generation functionality. Hopefully, such work will also lead to more radical improvements for the schematic, but in the mean time, some aesthetic improvements could help usability.
