As always, I look forward to seeing what you come up with and hopefully you will prove me wrong in my assumptions.
I do think that we need to accept that nodes are complex forms. There is a lot going on and not all of it happens in the expected order thanks to the way that node.js works so any node-based timer will be a fairly blunt object (pun intended!) but may welll still provide useful information as long as we remember that what is apparent in Node-RED isn't always what is actually happening thanks to async processing and the node.js processing loop.
