GUI ideas from someone who worked in VFX, animation and motion graphics

[paulrus]

Since the 1990's I've used node-based interfaces. ComfyUI is great, but the interface does a lot of things that I think people with my type of background would find weird or counterintuitive. I'm not saying my suggestions are the best you'll ever hear, but I think quite a number of things could be changed in a way that would bring it in line with interfaces from the evolution of node-based systems like Fusion, Shake, Nuke, Houdini, Softimage (ICE), Unreal Engine, etc. With that in mind, here are some suggestions.

Elbows. Alt-clicking on any line connecting nodes should create an elbow.
TAB - to bring up the search menu, use TAB, not double click. That's an absolute must-have.
Smarten up the search. If I type Load Image, it should also find LoadImage and vice versa.
Standardize the navigation or at least come up with a few systems to choose from that use hotkeys from software like Maya, Photoshop, etc. Like, Alt navigation (Maya) or spacebar to move around the canvas (Photoshop).
The zoom, pan, etc., is crazy on my system. Related to the previous suggestion, the zoom and pan is way too sensitive and jumps too much per scroll. You also should be able to pick a node from a zoomed-out view, hit F and it should Focus on that node, by zooming in to that node.
The scroll wheel function is backwards vs everything else on my system.
Standardize the naming conventions on all inputs and outputs so people aren't creating things that sound similar, but are incompatible.
CTRL-P - pause the function of a node
When a user attempts to connect something that's incompatible, it should be smart enough to give some suggestions. In most software I've used if you are trying to hook up something that's a vector and the input is expecting a scalar input, it's going to say so.
Create a way to have snapshots of workflows. Softimage had a nice implementation of this where you'd have a tab that had empty dots in the interface. If you clicked a dot, it turned white and indicated you'd stored a snapshot of the workflow (you could also use it for camera position in the interface). This way you can quickly try a few different things, compare them and jump back to previous versions if things don't work.

Last but not least. Do not fall into the open-source trap of believing that a minority of loud Blender users are speaking for an industry. It's a great application, but it's completely non-standard and that's been the case for 20 years. I think it's finally starting to turn the corner, but it would have become vastly more popular years ago if the users wouldn't have dug in their heels and fought so hard to do things the Blender way instead of the industry way. They have loads of talented people working on it, but their thoughts on interface design has been their biggest downfall year after year.

-PG