Why not go all the way and create a graphical programming environment? I've felt that this is long overdue.
That's why they are restrictive, they have to choose only a narrow set of methods to expose to the users. By narrowing their available functionality they also become useful for a smaller domain of problems.
Codify does not try to replace text-based programming, but instead to make it easier and sometimes more efficient for graphics-intensive programming. For example, the easy to reach color selector is much faster than having to use a separate tool to get the numbers for the color you want. Same thing for the image selector.
Check out the Mactech articles in the references.
I even wrote a decent size app in prograph. While I really liked it a large code base was really hard to navigate and maintain. Also you couldn't email code snippets around easily.