I love graphviz and have used it as part of my job for over 15 years.
That said, I have spent entirely too much time manually searching through the 100-odd dimensional Graphviz parameter space trying to get aesthetic results. So much time in fact that occasionally it's easier to fire up Omnigraph and draw the thing manually.
Graphviz would be ideal if it had some kind of meta-parameter settings that could reduce the tendency of its output to resemble an unreadable rats nest when the number of nodes exceeds about 20. I know that's part of the point of neato vs. dot, and that some parameters are effectively meta-parameters, but Graphviz still needs a better "porcelain" (in git-speak) with fewer dimensions.
This is an excellent idea. In general, allowing a human to say they would like to expend more machine cycles to search for better renderings would be useful. This would be an interesting summer intern project, It could probably be layered on top of the existing software.
I've had the same experience. What could help is a constraints-driven drawing, i.e. we could split the drawing space into an invisible grid and say that these nodes must be in cell 1, those nodes in cell 2 and so on.
That said, I have spent entirely too much time manually searching through the 100-odd dimensional Graphviz parameter space trying to get aesthetic results. So much time in fact that occasionally it's easier to fire up Omnigraph and draw the thing manually.
Graphviz would be ideal if it had some kind of meta-parameter settings that could reduce the tendency of its output to resemble an unreadable rats nest when the number of nodes exceeds about 20. I know that's part of the point of neato vs. dot, and that some parameters are effectively meta-parameters, but Graphviz still needs a better "porcelain" (in git-speak) with fewer dimensions.