Does that include research time? I sit around pondering solutions, drawing diagrams, planning. When implementing harder solutions, usually 2 hours of actual deep work. But there are days where I wire up the logic and other grunt work, I can do that for 5 to 6 hours.

Aren’t professional tools using node-based compositing, which ends up being just as complicated as code in big projects? They’ll do anything to hide the code, because code is scary, even if it’s the same.