I learned Maya on Irix, then purchased a License for Plug In development on Windows around 2004, which was pre-Python support. I really got to knew the DAG very well, as well as rendering custom helper tools in the viewport. It was extremely flexible to extend.

I've also kept an eye on Blender since then, and no other piece of OSS causes me so much joy to see the improvements it makes version after version, specially because they are usually linked to small movies which demonstrate the capabilities.

But the few times I've taken a look at the Python SDK, I've felt a bit turned off. It somehow felt a bit like Cinema4D, where you had this huge API to code against, but never ended up with small modules (DAG nodes) which were pretty much stand-alone utilities which you could then connect to anything Maya had to offer.

I've seen that Blender lately has something which feels a bit similar, but it appears to be limited to shading pipelines (Shader Nodes).

There are no such transform, group, deformer nodes and stuff like that which allows you to manipulate geometry, correct?

I mean, in Maya I'd build a simple data node (in C++) which had an input, and I'd route the xyz of an object to the xzy-input of my data node, and then apply particle physics to that object and hit play, and the data node would then obtain a "data stream" in its xyz-input representing the object's position, as a very trivial example. Even vertices could be "streamed" into such data nodes. How would I do such a thing in Blender (with Python)?