[_russross]

I've never really liked the look of the Tikz-generated automata. Something about them always looks a little off to me. I also dislike the use of 0 and 1 as the canonical alphabet. a and b look nicer, they stand out better in written instructions and solutions (when typeset using math mode), and (this sounds silly) sound nicer when talking about them with the class. Using 0 and 1 seems to imply some connection to binary that is not really there and probably confuses or misleads some students.

Of course, everyone will have a different opinion on such aesthetic matters. I taught an undergrad comp theory course for a decade or so and I wrote my own similar package[1] for generating diagrams using Metapost that built on the standard boxes package. Students were able to learn the system pretty quickly and the results were usually good, though it was pretty easy to pick out which students did/did not care about how things look.

[1] - https://github.com/russross/automata/