I have used Knime for a few months, enough to get comfortable with it, and while some of what you say is true I have to disagree about it standing up to command line tools. Especially after having tried to go through some code written by others in it.

The main problem I have with it is in many cases the upstream data has to be available to a node in order to be allowed to open the node up and see the configuration. This has resulted in my spending a day or two updating and tweaking database queries on an old connection and fixing the resulting configuration errors just to get to one node and read the configuration. In this case I didn't care about the data itself, I just needed the config of that one node.

This would not have been necessary with a text-based tool, where I could just scroll down and read. Knime can be a powerful tool but for sharing work I think it's unnecessarily painful.