I don’t think the two are as mutually exclusive as they look, but only if the simplification is a consumer of the existing model rather than a second, parallel one.
The trap is building a “simple mode” as a separate editor with its own state. Then you immediately owe answers to questions like: what happens to a pedalboard built in the full GUI when it’s opened in simple mode, and what happens to a simple-mode edit when the same board is later opened in the full editor. Every project that tries this ends up either round-tripping badly or quietly forbidding you from moving between them, which is worse than not having it.
What avoids that is treating the simple view as a projection of the graph, not an alternative to it. Concretely: the full editor already lets you expose a small set of parameters as addressings. If a pedalboard could carry an ordered list of, say, eight exposed controls with author-supplied names and ranges, the simple GUI is then a generated page — one screen, eight controls, no graph, no cables — and it needs no new state at all. Anyone who opens the same board in the full editor sees the same board, because it is the same board. A pedalboard with no exposed controls simply doesn’t appear in the simple view.
That also solves the discovery problem in a way a redesigned editor doesn’t. The reason a newcomer bounces off is rarely that the routing UI is ugly; it’s that they don’t know which of 500 plugins to reach for or what a sensible chain looks like. Curated boards with a handful of labelled knobs answer that directly, and they’re content, not code. The Zynthian JFK framing linked above is essentially the same insight: pick the primary use case, ship a preset that embodies it, and let the general machine stay general underneath.
Two smaller things that would carry a lot of the weight without any redesign at all:
Make the device’s own screens sufficient for the whole play-time loop — load a board, switch snapshots, tweak the exposed knobs — so a plug-and-play user never has to open a browser. For that audience the web GUI existing is itself the friction.
Have the store/board listings state what each board expects at its input and output. A huge share of “it doesn’t work” for beginners is a board built around a guitar-level DI being loaded by someone with a line-level source, and nothing in the interface tells them.
Whether simple mode should be able to edit the graph at all, I’d say no. The moment it can add a plugin you’ve rebuilt the full editor badly.
