[elijahbenizzy]

One of the authors here — I think that systems that produce things magically often run into this burden. That doesn’t mean that the magic is bad, per se, rather that the thought put into operationalizing it (the user experience) is often << than that put into executing it (the engine).

In our case there’s very little magic, and a dead simple engine (so far). We (from a DS perspective) have found that expressing transforms in this manner simplifies the code making it well worth the added layer of abstraction. As a platform team we’ve focused on debugging (viz, etc…), but this is part of the reason we open sourced it! The more voices we get the more operational concerns we can iron out to avoid painful debugging experiences.