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I sometimes wonder if the data transformations found in ECS Systems could be constructed through a visual editor. An analogue might be Unity's Shader Graph, where a developer with a less technical background can program a GPU's SIMD architecture.

Do you think that sort of thing could ever be feasible in Bevy?

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This is definitely feasible in Bevy (either via Rust codegen, "interpreter-style" node execution, or scripting). And will be even more feasible once we have an official visual Bevy Editor. However I'm pretty skeptical of "visual / node based programming" and I wouldn't personally prioritize that work when we have so many other things to do. That being said, I'm guessing someone will eventually build a 3rd party plugin to do this.

Unreal's Niagara has a visual editor. While it is packaged as an VFX/particle editor, it is in many ways an ECS. Each particle can have custom data structure and modules/systems that drive them. Under the hood the graphs are translated to SIMD-optimized VM bytecode when run on CPU. It can even support translation to HLSL/GPU-acceleration if all modules support it. Not sure if Unity has something similar.

https://unity.com/visual-effect-graph

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