Sounds like a good reason to try to do better. Unless you suppose the UI of programming is solved and everyone who wants to have control over a machine just needs to bite down and learn vim ?
Grabbing AST nodes and dragging them around is never the bottleneck when I'm programming. Cut/paste is plenty efficient even in notepad and doesn't require gross arm movements. Feel free to try it, but I maintain doubt that a literal forest of code is going to be anything more than a gimmick. By all means, prove me wrong!
:D I'm with you on gross arm movements, I'm just trying to expand the code-viewing experience beyond "strings stacked on top of one another"
While all the VR goggles try to embed your body into virtual space (putting the graphics "around you") I'm prototyping with a stereo-microscope, with it's nice heavy knobs for course and fine adjustment, such that you're looking into the virtual world from the outside. No illusions to pull off, no motion sickness, and nothing strapped to your face.